Actions
Forum Thread Details
  • State Not Answered
  • Replies 13 replies
  • Subscribers 360 subscribers
  • Views 2432 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Related

Pocket Oscilloscopes, experiences?

Catwell
A friend of mine just bought a "pocket" Oscilloscope, a DSO nano to be exact. It's self contained, onboard LCD that rivals my cell phone's, 1Mhz bandwidth, stores waveforms, and is only single channel. Perhaps I am suffering from gadget lust here, but it looks amazing, and I feel I must have one. However, I've never used any o-scope on that scale. To anyone who has, what can I expect?  I like the portability, the functions, and defilitely the price. And I am aware that I can only measure signals of up to 100khz with a 1Mhz bandwidth, but I rarely need to exceed that frequency.


Cabe
  • 0 in reply to michaelkellett

    Although the DS1054Z is not 'pocketable' it will give you 50 MHz "real" bandwith (i.e. single shot) with 4 channels (250MS/s per channel).

    With one channel you'll get the full 1GSps, but then it's useless to have the 50MHz limit image

     

    It weighs 3kg, so I regularly take it with me in a small backpack when I go troubleshooting! I think the only real use of scopemeters is when you're very space-limited, for instance in installation work.

  • 0 in reply to vsluiter

    I'm totally with you there - I haven't bought  a Scopemeter since the very original one (made by Philips (any one want to buy a valuable antique ?))  - a real scope is much better (and much better value).

     

    It's a shame that you have to pay double to get 100MHz bandwidth.

     

    MK

  • 0 in reply to michaelkellett

    An important thing to also remember no matter the scope type you choose is that you need maybe 5* the scope bandwidth than the signal you want to measure (As a general rule)

     

     

     

    Unless everything you’re going to measure is a perfect sine wave, scope bandwidth is based on showing a sine wave, not square or other shapes, so for instance if your wanting to verify the integrity of a 20Mhz clock or output from a micro you will need 5* that or 100Mhz bandwidth if your to have any chance of seeing the real or close to real signal, a 50Mhz bandwidth will be attenuating the faster edges and making what may be a square wave toward looking like a sine wave

     

     

     

    Square waves , triangle waves etc are made up from harmonics of a sine wave so for instance a 20Mhz triangle will need harmonics of 60Mhz and 100Mhz and that’s only the first 2 odd harmonics

     

     

     

    Sounds like a good thing for a tutorial video…hmm

     

     

     

    Peter