New scope...

Bought this (well not quite this one, mine has Chinese text on the panel) little puppy yesterday as my old UNI-T was just getting too frustrating to use. In particular its triggering ability is almost useless, giving way too much jitter. That added to the trig level encoder being majorly unreliable (its just over a year old) and lots of apparently self-induced noise on the trace meant I decided to bite the bullet. And boy I'm glad I did - its like getting a new pair of HD800s to replace my aged Sony CD3000s, everything is much clearer.... (and no, I haven't made that particular upgrade yet).

About six months ago I first noticed the younger sibling of this scope in a shop window in the local electronics market. I was blown away - a widescreen scope? That screen was drop dead gorgeous! This pic really doesn't do it justice so hopefully I'll post up one of my own pics soon.

Having been immediately sold on the screen, the doubts began to set in. Its an unknown brand for one. Second, I already have a scope - why would I need another one? Ignoring my second objection for now, I did some research into Chinese brand scopes, and found that by and large the most respected name is Rigol. I'd originally bought my UNI-T because I recognised the brand (I have one of their multimeters and UNI-T is sold in UK through Farnell) but really brand recognition I've concluded is simply not enough when buying something as essential as a scope. Tek of course is the cost-no-object purchase, but here they're even more expensive than back in UK so that's ruled out on principle.

I found that with the Rigol, its not necessary to stump up the cash for the 100MHz model (around 3300CNY) but that the much cheaper 50MHz (1800CNY) model can be firmware upgraded to perform the same. Dave's EEVblog shows how. That's a ridiculously low price for 100MHz performance (in dollar terms, about $265).

So I went and had a play with the Rigol, taking along my QA-550 wav player to see how much better than the UNI-T it was. No doubt about it, the jitter and noise I was seeing simply wasn't there on the Rigol. The Rigol also allows the trig point to be much earlier in time compared to the portion of the waveform being viewed, so jitter can be seen down to a lower frequency. But the Rigol's screen was merely functional when compared to the Tekway, having seen such eye candy I knew the more washed out colours of the Rigol could never satisfy. The Tekway produced similar results to the Rigol when I played with it in the shop, only that huge screen gives a far more spacious feel - there's so much more information on the display and yet it doesn't feel at all cramped. The difference in resolution is substantial - 320 x 240 against 800 x 480. No contest so Tekway it was.

On getting it home and powering up, the initial difficulty was that its menus are all in Chinese with no language options available. No matter, the English language user manual is available online. There's one other thing too that I failed to notice in the shop - the thing is dead quiet - it seems to have no fan, or if it does its not running. The UNI-T's fan was louder than my PC's, very distracting, especially disturbing when listening to music. Apart from minor concerns about whether the new scope will overheat in the longer term (the upcoming long hot summer will tell), I'm really over the moon with this new toy