OWON PDS 6042S oscilloscope review

[wakibaki]

I bought an OWON PDS 6042S oscilloscope for light and portable use at work. It cost around UKP290

It's a 40 MHz nominal bandwidth with 250 Megasamples. About 10 samples/cycle are reckoned to be required for a reasonable picture so I rate the scope as running out of steam at maybe 25 MHz. I'd rather 9 bits resolution than the 8 bits this has. I picked this one as offering the best price/performance from the range, there are 40 & 60 MHz models sharing the same sample rate.

First impressions are that the box is light and feels tacky and cheap compared to the scopes I have used in the past. It's bulkier than a Tek handheld but feels to have some empty space in the box. The buttons and switches likewise have a poor 'feel' but are probably functionally quite adequate. The screen has a narrow angle of visibility and cannot be viewed from high or low angles. The traces are red and yellow. When viewed pretty much straight on the screen is adequate. The scope has a pretty regular feature set with dedicated menu buttons associated with the screen. The 10x probes supplied are of reasonable quality and are marked 60 MHz, both are supplied with a push-fit spring-loaded hook, these are very useful in practice. There is a probe compensation squarewave output on the scope.

It will mostly get used for debug of PIC micro circuits which are not too fast for it, maybe some serial comms. RS232 and CanBus. Not much analog stuff, although there are a few circuits - PWMs and other control functions.

Anyway, thus far the scope seems to do what it's supposed to do, a couple of people have borrowed it and found it OK. Bear in mind tho' that we're not doing anything very rigorous with it, or depending on measurements taken from it, just mostly digital debug.

I have fiddled around with the math functions a bit, you have to cycle through them to the one you want and then take a reading without changing the vertical scale, 'cause if you change it the reading (e.g. Pk-Pk) will double or halve with the resolution change and you have to cycle through the options (RMS, Pk-Pk etc.) again to get the right reading.

If any serious flaws emerge in the future I'll post them here.

All-in-all I think it's acceptable value as long as it doesn't go udders-up in the near future.

w

jeez, I hate it when this thing tries to censor me... teats, breasts, bazooms, bristols... Suppose I wanted to talk about a blue-t1t?