Gonna buy a new oscilloscope, which one to buy?

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#41
Very satisfied Rigol DS2000 series scope owner here. Glad I bought, would buy again.

However,

There are a few annoyances. Number one on my list is the Rigol-made, Rigol-branded probes. Have a look at the kit, taken straight from the Rigol sales page:
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What don't you see?

That's right, you don't see a BNC adapter that lets you plug your probe straight into a BNC female jack without a pigtail + crocodile clip GND attachment. The gizmo I'm pointing to with a red and white arrow here

attachment.php


Furthermore, the Rigol probe's GND sleeve is much smaller diameter than "industry standard" so the aftermarket BNC adapters (like THESE, qty=10 for $35.00) don't fit. So I swallowed hard and bought a couple of aftermarket, non-Rigol probes that are the industry standard size and that do fit BNC adapters. They work fine but the extra expense chaps my hide .
 

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#43
tomchr said:
A quick note on FFTs, pico-scopes and whatnot:

The built-in FFT of a sampling scope should be good enough for measuring THD down to 0.1 % maybe approaching 0.01 % at 1 kHz so it could be handy for some debugging work.

To get beyond that, an external sound card with Pete Millett's Sound Card Interface could work. I don't know the THD of Pete's interface, though. Mostly what you need is input ranges. If you pay attention to detail and are a bit careful, you can easily set up a couple of resistive dividers to accomplish the task. For good sound cards, I'd look at the Focusrite Scarlett series. They're reasonably priced and the performance is hard to beat. That's your $200 solution.

The next step up would be the Quaint Asylum QA400-series. Its headline specs rival that of the APx515 at a small fraction of the price. That said, I suspect the QA400 is awesome if you run it right at its optimum point, but away from that, you'll see some compromises. Last I checked the QA400 ran about $400.

Next up is the Audio Precision line of goods. The main kink there is that AP for the longest time used its own proprietary interface (APIB), which required an expansion card to be inserted in the host PC. Made perfect sense at the time. For AP systems without USB, one can use the APIB-USB interface ($400), however, it only works with AP SYS-2500 and above. So if you're looking at used APs, I suggest looking for SYS-2500 and beyond.
The software for the SYS-2500 and SYS-2700 is leaving a lot to be desired. While it does work, it is not intuitive to use at all. The software for the newer APx-series is absolutely amazing, though. The hardware is solid, as you'd expect from AP. The AP boxes start at about $6500 as I recall.

...and no. I don't work for AP. I just like their stuff - especially the APx-series of stuff.

Pico scopes: Wouldn't touch them. They usually have two ranges: 100 mV and 1 V. That's just not enough for analog work. Great for a logic analyzer. Not great for a scope. I still use my TEK 2465B (400 MHz analog/digital scope). Works great.

Tom
Click to expand...


2072 has range down to 5uV!!!!!

I think its time to have a look around there Tom things have changed in a few years since you bought your stuff
 
#45
Mark Johnson said:
Very satisfied Rigol DS2000 series scope owner here. Glad I bought, would buy again.

However,

There are a few annoyances. Number one on my list is the Rigol-made, Rigol-branded probes. Have a look at the kit, taken straight from the Rigol sales page:
attachment.php


What don't you see?

That's right, you don't see a BNC adapter that lets you plug your probe straight into a BNC female jack without a pigtail + crocodile clip GND attachment. The gizmo I'm pointing to with a red and white arrow here

attachment.php


Furthermore, the Rigol probe's GND sleeve is much smaller diameter than "industry standard" so the aftermarket BNC adapters (like THESE, qty=10 for $35.00) don't fit. So I swallowed hard and bought a couple of aftermarket, non-Rigol probes that are the industry standard size and that do fit BNC adapters. They work fine but the extra expense chaps my hide .
Click to expand...

Are you telling me that industri standard probes does not fit into the scope or that i have to buy new better ones?

The ground clip looks very short, to short?
 
#47
AKN said:
Silversweden,
I think you misunderstood Mark.
Probes will of course fit the scope. Problem is, in the other end, when you connect probe to a BNC adapter.
Click to expand...
Why wouldn't you use a bnc cable instead of a probe in this case? The cable has less inductance issues, are cheap and easy to find. The only thing I can think of is ease, you don't have to switch out the probe with a cable.
 
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#52
I had to choose between Rigol 1054Z and 2072A when I purchased my scope last year, I ended up getting a DS2072A-S (built in function generator), and have been very satisfied with it since.

You can consider the 2072A a 300MHz scope, eevblog have procedures to perform risk free hacking to upgrade it to 300MHz with maximum features, just take 5 minutes. (And you can consider the 1054Z a 100MHz scope also)

The FFT feature of the 2072A is a joke though.
 
#54
I just purchased a Agilent HP 54510B with FFT after some searching on EBAY. I started out looking for a Hitachi 6045A like the one I use at work. After some searching and looking at other brands I happened across this Seller Watronics. What I liked about this scope was the seller is a retired engineer for Agilent with 35 years in development of this product. He buys scopes listed as repair or parts and refurbishes and calibrates them.I will have to reserve judgement for this scope, and maybe someone has or can speak for this line of scopes,but for the features and price point this may be well worth investigating Watronics offerings.

Sent from my HTC Desire 626 using Tapatalk
 
#55
PapaZBill said:
I just purchased a Agilent HP 54510B with FFT after some searching on EBAY. I started out looking for a Hitachi 6045A like the one I use at work. After some searching and looking at other brands I happened across this Seller Watronics. What I liked about this scope was the seller is a retired engineer for Agilent with 35 years in development of this product. He buys scopes listed as repair or parts and refurbishes and calibrates them.I will have to reserve judgement for this scope, and maybe someone has or can speak for this line of scopes,but for the features and price point this may be well worth investigating Watronics offerings.

Sent from my HTC Desire 626 using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
The biggest flaw with the 54xxx line of scopes is that they use only a 6 bit ADC. This means your vertical resolution becomes VERY quantized. They also lack many of your features of more modern scopes like deep memory, intensity gradient, some common triggering options, etc but in spite of all this they do work well. You will find very very few bugs in their software, because they were made in a time where those scopes cost $10s of thousands and the comparative work went into them. If you can work inside their constraints (namely the low vertical resolution) they are ok scopes but they leave a lot to be desired compared to modern offerings.
 
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#56
I have owned hi end oscilloscopes and usb oscilloscopes. Depends on your needs. For projects with lethal voltages I prefer to work with the real ones but for smaller projects I prefer usb oscilloscopes because they are small and portable. I own PoScopeMega1 by PoLabs which is perfect for my current projects. It's dual channel 12-bit oscilloscope with signal generator and logic analyzer - all in one. There are many other companies that produce similar oscilloscopes but devices are not problems but software. I like software which is straightforward and you can do with one click everything. Polabs has their own PoScope4 software which is really awsome. Simple for usage with different displays (oscilloscope, fft, recorder, logic analyzer) and you can use multiple oscilloscopes in same application. Their user support is very responsive and helpful which means a lot. Bundle package (device + software) costs around 90€.

Check out their web site: https://www.poscope.com/PoScopeMega1bundle
Their blog with useful articles: USB oscilloscope Archives - PoBlog?

p.s. Although it may seems like I am advertising PoScopeMega1 I must emphasize that I am just happy user of their products and that's all. I am not connected with their company in any way.
 
#57
This is my new scope, after testing it at the dealer i decided to go for it. Compared to the 2000series this has 4 channels and is a later design, for less than half the price.

The guy i spoke to told me that a lot of their customers buy the 1054z, altough the 2000series is a better scope many go directly for the 4000 if they need something better.

I have used this scope for two days now and im satisfyed.
It was really easy to probe a balanced signal using two probes and inverting ch2. Then using the math a+b i could directly see both the signals and the sum of them. Maybe it could be a bit more responsive but i have nothing to compare it to and i can live with it.

Still like my old tektronix better, it has some kind of magic 😉

Maybe i will report back after using it for some days, still havent got used to it, but at this price its really good. And i have a lot of money over that i can spend on some kind of fft set up.
 

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#58
silversweden said:
This is my new scope, after testing it at the dealer i decided to go for it. Compared to the 2000series this has 4 channels and is a later design, for less than half the price.

The guy i spoke to told me that a lot of their customers buy the 1054z, altough the 2000series is a better scope many go directly for the 4000 if they need something better.

I have used this scope for two days now and im satisfyed.
It was really easy to probe a balanced signal using two probes and inverting ch2. Then using the math a+b i could directly see both the signals and the sum of them. Maybe it could be a bit more responsive but i have nothing to compare it to and i can live with it.

Still like my old tektronix better, it has some kind of magic 😉

Maybe i will report back after using it for some days, still havent got used to it, but at this price its really good. And i have a lot of money over that i can spend on some kind of fft set up.
Click to expand...

Glad ot hear that you are satisfied. Have you visited Riglol to unlock all of the features of your scope (ignore the 500uV feature, that was in beta and found to not be stable enough for Rigol's liking so they removed it). Im actually surprised many people jump for the 4000 series scope. It is considered to be kind of an also-ran. While Rigol is great forthe price range, when you need that degree of higher performance, you are no longer int he hobbyist range and as a result usually not looking to cut corners. In the upper ranges most people are looking at Keysight, Rohde&Shwartz, Tektronix, LeCroy.

Otherwise, good luck in building out the rest of your lab.
 
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