Engineers are on the go. Gone are the days when engineers do most of their work in the lab or on the bench. They use test equipment in the facility or at a job site, that is, out of the ordinary locations. For these settings, engineers need handheld, portable equipment to make precise, accurate measurements. Handheld oscilloscopes are the focus of this month's Question of the Month: How often do you use a Handheld Oscilloscope?
How would you define reasonably capable?
The one I have, is comparable to a 100 MHz 2 channel bench scope like the Rigol 1102 for generic use and usability (including screen resolution). Except for elaborate triggering. That's more difficult on my handhold.
Action photo: capture timer pulse of a GPS, while I try to configure the behaviour of said pulse:
My example is using a digital and CRT scope looking at CD player RF waveform.
both will show the waveform But when you have a sad spindle motor
you won't see the fault on the digital scope.
I'm intrigued , I have a couple of CRT scopes but never use them. I haven't had issues with things I can't see on a digital scope but might on an analogue for a very long time. (Although ground loop hf noise from the digital scopes can be an issue.)
I was tempted by a Telequipment D83 on Ebay (I used one about 50 years ago !) -
but then I remembered that I wouldn't use it 
So I would be interested to see a situation that I might be missing .
(The D83 is still there at £55 but it might not work !)
MK
Nice-looking instrument. I still miss using the first 'scope I got familiar with, which was a Hitachi 'storage scope.
I had to repair a Pioneer CD player the other day (30-years old!), the service manual mentioned an RF adjustment, from what I can tell it's just trying to minimize jitter, but I didn't check or adjust it, since I didn't want to touch anything if it already worked (it's my first time repairing a CD player - only did it because it was for a friend).
A DSO would be very good for displaying this:
For the lower-frequency signals, there were adjustments like this, for the various servo adjustments; using XY mode:
There was also this interesting signal, that appears to want to align the angle of the laser/photodiode assembly, to get it to sit in the CD grating line. I didn't touch that either!
My extent of the repair was replacing all the belts, and swapping out the snapped bits (it must have been forcibly opened in the past), by using a donor non-working CD player from ebay. I also learned it's not a good idea to buy a Pioneer product with '01' in the product name suffix, e.g. model 201, 301 etc.. because they fix the issues in models 202, 302, etc. Some of the plastic parts changed from 01 to 02, but then remained the same for versions 03, 04, etc. This is obvious really, but sometimes easy to forget when purchasing products.
