scope

[Don Tillman]

   Date: Sun, 07 Feb 1999 12:25:47 -0700
   From: Ian Fritz <ijfritz at earthlink.net>
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   Has anybody had any experience using the Tek TDS200 series scopes? I'd
   like to know how well they work, if there are any special quirks and
   especially if the LCD display is difficult to read. Thanks!

I archive all my postings, so...  (there's an afterthought below)

----------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Wed Oct 28 08:16:42 -0800 1998
To: synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl, rsowa at WizjaTV.pl
Subject: Re: ODP: scope question
From: Don Tillman <don at till.com>

   From: Roman Sowa <rsowa at WizjaTV.pl>
   Date: Wed, 28 Oct 1998 12:14:43 +0100

   i'm about to buy Tek's TDS210 (60MHz, 1GS/s, LCD)
   anyone used this?
   is it reeeally good or just good?
   i don't want to spend too much ($1400) on a scope which is 
   just not-bad

Yes, I've had one for about a year.  I like it a lot.  It's better
than an analog scope in some ways and worse in others.  It's got a
different feel than an analog scope, and that takes some getting used
to, but I find it very useful.

The price is very reasonable, it can grab waveforms and you can
examine them closely, measure points on the waveform accurately, it
can do averaging over each trigger event, and all that.

I would avoid those small hand-held portable scopes like the plague --
Fluke, Tektronics, and anybody else who's making them now.  It takes
about 5 seconds between the event happening and the display updating,
then another 5 seconds for the passive LCD display to fade up the new
image.  And the user interface is more like a Gameboy than a scope.
Yick.

The cool thing about the TDS210 is that it has a proper scope-like
user interface.  And it's pretty quick about displaying, active LCDs
and fast processing, though I would prefer it a little faster.

  -- Don
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later...

One very nice feature is the ability to set the persistance to
infinite.  You can't do that on an analog scope in that price range.
When I was working on my interpolating scanner circuit, breadboarding
it and tweaking some values, I can't describe how cool it was to set
persistance to infinite and tap the probe to each of the eight scanner
outputs, and see all eight overlapping curves on the screen at once
and be able to compare them right there.

  -- Don