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Ah, But many of these scopes, especially the Tektronix models, have the option of connection to a computer and with the right software, you can store an unlimited number of waveforms or increase the record length by using the computer's RAM rather than the scope's RAM.
True - long term storage isn't a problem, but the memory in the scope is the longest "single shot" sample you can buffer to quickly enough. I'm sure a few thousand samples is all you'd need for most applications, but if not, it would seem difficult to break a "longer" signal down by triggering later and later and trying to stitch them together on the PC. I dunno, I don't even have one yet!
The other issue I don't like with DSOs is that you have to get a more expensive model to get decent spectrum analysis and waveform math like FFT functions. Of course, the USB-based ones get around this pretty well, but the software is different for each one, some good, some not so good, and you end up paying more for a new device thought it has less bandwidth than a comparable used DSO. What would be cool is if there were some good open source software that would process signals uploaded by these earlier model DSOs. Best of both worlds.
DSO's don't generally have a complex file format, often times it's just a byte stream of the raw samples, no strings attached. A simple hex editor and feeding a few known samples into the scope will easily let you decode the file format. Once you have it converted into some kind of raw sample format you can do any number of things with it. From FFT to more complex processing using a C program.
Good point - and it probably wouldn't be too hard to figure out the required format for any of the usb-based scope's accompanying software - which is pretty much always available to download for free. Brilliant!
P.S. - I just "won" my first scope on eBay. Yay! The old Tektronix 2232 - a beater, I know, but 100Ms/s sampling rate, 4k memory, everything I'll need for the forseable future, and with this new revelation I'm even more glad I went this route - it has a RS232C interface on it. And only $125.
At 100 million samples per second that's 40 u seconds of recording time per trigger, less the time it takes to get rid of the data via RS232. At 1msps that's a 4ms sample window size per trigger event.
For serial data at 10khz you can actually buffer a half second of data =)
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