[sdiy] Oscilloscope on a Budget 200

[Richie Burnett]

Yes, was going to say...  The EE dept at work has DSO-X2014A Agilent scopes 
in their undergrad labs.  They're classed as entry-level models but have a 
nice big screen for a reasonable cost.

-Richie,


-----Original Message----- 
From: Bruno Afonso
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2016 6:31 PM
To: Richie Burnett ; Sdiy
Subject: Re: [sdiy] Oscilloscope on a Budget 200


We recently got a MSOX2024A (agilent) and they even included all possible 
software add-ons, it was a promo they were running end of last year. I still 
have to test the MSO part of it but it's feature-packed for an entry level 
oscilloscope. Everything seemed better compared to the tektronix models. I'm 
no expert in oscilloscopes but even for my simple electronics work it has a 
bunch of useful features that our older TDS2024 does not have.

I asked the EEs around here and it basically comes down to what you know and 
trust. A lot of people like the high end tektronix oscilloscopes, which is 
not relevant to this discussion. The appeal of these USB oscilloscopes is 
high but at the end of the day, nothing beats some dials and a built-in 
screen. But if you're on a budget...





On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 7:34 AM Richie Burnett <rburnett at richieburnett.co.uk> 
wrote:
>> Some of the cheap Chinese copycat models will quite happily show you a
>> 20MHz signal as a 1kHz signal if you have the timebase set to 100us/div.
>> That really confuses students (>.<)

> and if it doesn’t confuse the user at least she or he loses time when
> ruling out artifacts.

*Exactly*  It ultimately comes down to a question of how much your time is
worth?  If you're doing hobby stuff for fun and have plenty of time to learn
about aliasing and artefacts then by all means get something cheap and get
cracking.  But if you are running a business with products to get out the
door and deadlines to meet, (or have very limited hobby time but a bit of
spare cash,) then it's worth buying the best that you can afford.

> I’m not looking for something cheap but rather affordable (seeing that as
> an investment).

What do you class as affordable?

> I remember Tim Stinchcombe bringing his TDS 210 to Cambridge, which is not
> a handheld but a lot more portable.

The TDS210 is nice, but quite old now.  You can probably pick up later Tek
TDS1000  and TDS2000 series units second-hand now, and they are more capable
scopes.

>> Conversely the likes of Agilent and Tektronics either show a nice shaded
>> smudge of HF, or filter it out completely, but never undersampled.

> What would you prefer? Filtering?

I am a fan of HP / Agilent or whatever they're calling themselves this week.

I've got a DSO6034A on my bench which I think is excellent even though it's
nearly ten years old now.  It's quite a high spec but I do a lot of work at
MHz frequencies, and it is essential to my livelihood.  Models with less
channels and less bandwidth will be cheaper, and can probably even be picked
up second-hand now too.  (In the ten years that I've had it, I've only
encountered one tiny bug in the firmware, where it very occasionally powers
up with the 50-ohm termination enabled on one of the channels, and you have
to unplug the probe and reconnect it for the termination to switch off!)

A few years ago I compared Agilent's current offerings with Tektronix in the
same price range, and felt that Agilent had the edge in three areas:

1. More responsive user interface.  The Tek user interface at the time felt
under-powered and laggy.  Not so much of a problem for a newbie finding
their way around, but frustrating for anyone who knows their way around a
scope and makes quick adjustments to controls, if the display takes a while
to catch up.

2. More features built-in for the price.  The Agilent scope had most maths
features like FFT built-in, where they cost extra money for the same
features on the equivalent Tek models.  (These days even the cheap Chinese
models usually have the maths features built-in!)

3. Better anti-alias filtering and more intuitive display of "difficult
waveforms".  Things like looking for runt pulses or corrupted data that only
happens every once in a while.

These days the swing might be back towards Tek or even LeCroy might have a
more budget offering?

-Richie,

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