You know the feeling; it’s always nice to get a new piece of kit to help with the day to day tasks. I have always been a believer in the right tool for the right job, and this scope fitted the job very well.
Out of the box, it feels solid, and has a reassuring weight. But above all its very slim from front to back, so it fits well on your desk and does not take up much working area, which is important if your desk is full of other equipment and components. The screen is wide at seven inches, and at 480 x 234 pixels is a very workable resolution, it also has full colour with the traditional yellow, blue, magenta, and green channels.
Plugging in and switching on brings up a splash screen. This last for longer than would be expected, but after the wait the scope comes to life in full colour and ready to go.
Looking around the front panel looks intuitive, with the standard channel scale and position controls along it, with the channel on and off buttons in their colours. Also there is an Aux Input, which has trigger levels form -12.5V to +12.5V. Above are the wave inspector and zoom controls. Just below these are three button used for creating and editing marks. These marks are used along with the wave inspector to mark positions of points of interest in the capture. This allows you to pin point and mark points of interest in the measured waveform, with as much detail as you need.
Attaching the probes is easy with a twist on coupling. Once connected I attached channel one to the compensation adjustment output, provided on the right hand side of the front panel. This provides a square wave with approximately five volts peak to peak. Pressing the auto setup key gave a nice steady display. This feature, although not new, does work very well and will always give a good starting point when using a new item of kit. It also allows for the adjustment of the probe’s compensation using the small trimmer tool provided.
The screen, although a little grainy, is bright and clear. There is a nice use of colours, and the screen layouts make it easy to see what you are doing. The screen also displays the menu options along the bottom and right hand side of the screen. The menu options available change dynamically with the scopes’ current setup, which makes adjusting parameters very quick and easy. A nice feature is the waveform only button located at the top of the unit. Pressing this clears the screen of all other information apart from the measured waveform. This is a toggle button so pressing it again brings back the information. I used this to grab quick screen captures of reading both with and without the extra information. A nice touch if you need to document just a basic screen of data.
I was very pleased to see that grabbing screens from this scope to a usb drive was quick and very easy, a feature that really does make you feel good when using this scope.
Being able to capture a screen at any time by pressing the “save” button, then using the image straight into documentation, is a great time saver. You plug in the usb memory device and press the save button, which then saves a 480x234 capture of the current screen straight to the external drive. The file name will auto increment so you can just keep on capturing as you go. The resulting file is a 150 dpi full colour bmp, and is one for one pixel image of the screen, so you get no resizing compression artefacts.
The file type can be changed to other graphic file types using the menu if required too.
For quick and easy measurements, just connect the probes to your test points, press the “autoset” button, and you will get a good starting point screen. In some cases this maybe all that you need to get a quick reading. From there you have a very wide range of options to use to measure, record and report on your readings.
The Wave Inspector
This function allows you to zoom and track the current readings of the displayed waveform. The control comprises of an inner and outer rotating combination control. Turning the inner control zooms in and out of the current reading letting you have a closer view of the live signal, while the outer control scrolls along the captured waveform. This control has a proportional scroll speed depending on how much you are turning the control left or right. The top of the screen in this mode shows a full representation of the current capture, and along with the zoom position shown by grey square brackets, marks are shown allowing you to skip to points in the waveform that you have marked as interesting. At the bottom right of the screen you are shown the frequency of the reading and the scope trigger voltage level.
Once you have the waveform view as you need it you can start to do some measurements beyond the default screen data.
Measurer Control
Pressing the measure button at the top of the unit brings up a array of menu options that are aligned with the buttons surrounding the screen. This is where the multipurpose rotary controls come in to play. With the measurements menu on the screen, rotating the top multipurpose control will scroll up and down the many waveform measurement options available for you to use. There are a massive, thirty measurement options available on this menu alone, from frequency to cycle area. The best part of all is that you can add up to four measurements to the screen one by one. They are stacked up in the lower right hand corner along, in each measured channel colour and number. I loved this feature, we all know that documenting new designs or tracking issues with designs is a real pain at times. This feature allows you to build a screen exactly as you need it, then as mentioned above captures in full colour to a file at the press of the save button. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Cursors
Pressing the cursors button on the top left of the front panel brings up the two cursor bars. These cursors are used to measure timings between points in a waveform display relevant to the trigger point indicated on the screen by the small orange “T”. You can move the vertical measurement points using the two multipurpose rotary controls. The top control moves the right hand side bar and the lower control moves the left hand cursor. Added to the screen is a small box with the readings and data from the selected channels waveform. Timings and voltages are displayed within this box.
Various cursor modes are available, and both horizontal and vertical can be adjusted using the select button.
Saving your setup
After you have spent time setting up and tweaking your readings, this scope allows you to save the setup for future recall. This is very easy, you just push the menu button, which pulls up menu options for each of the buttons along the bottom and right hand side, and click the ToFile button. You then have the option to name the file or you can just accept the default file name. Setups are saved with the file extension .SET.
Screen Annotation
Although a little fiddly to use, you can label channels and math functions with your own wording. This brings into play the multipurpose controls, which allow you to scroll and select the available ASCII characters. These then show up on the screen and follow the positions of the data you have tagged.
Default Setup
Having setup the scope to your liking it is a nice touch to be able to reset the scope to a default setup. With some devices it is frustrating if you find yourself changing something and not knowing how to get back to where you were. This feature provides a safe start point for every new reading.
Of course if you have saved a setup to USB drive than you can recall that setup quickly.
Included Software and PC Connectivity
Due to time constraints with on going projects, I only just managed to install the supplied software on to a PC, and obtain the licence keys for the software. I can not give a detailed description of the software, but it was very functional and easy to learn and use.
I did however obtain readings and screen captures from the scope, within just a few minutes of installing.
The unit I had only had USB connectivity. That was a disappointment as accessing and monitoring the scope from anywhere on our network would be a great advantage, if I wanted to monitor or log data on a longer term basis.
For me one big issue with the software’s screen capture from the scope was that it is not in the glorious full colours of the scope’s screen. It would have been nice to have been able to capture the screen and all its readings with a black background. Instead the capture had a white background, which was not as clear as the screen on the scope. Having said that, being able to control, read and save the data from the scope is a great feature.
Logic Analyser
Included within this scope is a great 16 channel logic analyser. There were nice touches including showing 1’s in green and 0’s in blue, the logic analyser working in an intuitive way and being very integrated with the rest of the scope. Being able to record digital readings and have a visual display of the waveforms, then scrolling along and zooming to interest points is also a great feature. I would have liked to be able to try the I2C serial module with this scope but it was not supplied for the demo.
Summary
I really enjoyed reviewing this scope. I would have like a little longer to get to know it, as my month was not long enough to try every feature from the superb piece of lab kit. But from what I have seen and used of the functions I would recommend it to fellow engineers. Unfortunately due to pressures of project work I only managed to review just a small subset of the functionality that is available from this device.
I was a bit disappointed that no serial modules were not included with the demo unit. I would have been very interested to use the I2C module as my current and past designs use this serial bus to a large extent, and it would have been great to have been able to compare our existing scope with the Tektronix.
This aside, the usability of this scope encourages adventurous use, as you can always get back to a default start point. The learning curve is not that steep if you have used scopes before, and the intuitive functions and layout almost makes the user manual redundant. I must say that the printed manual is very clear and concise, not to big and it is nice that a printed manual is included, rather than having to print out a PDF manual from CD.
If I was looking for a good all round scope with some great features that can help your day be less stressful, then this has to be a great addition to your everyday toolkit.
