Which Oscilloscope?

[Arpangel]

I need an oscilloscope, the number of times I could have used one lately is getting ridiculous.
I don’t want to take up space in my modular cabinets with expensive scope modules, and I also need certain features that may not be present in some units.
I need a proper large display, and one that shows a frequency read-out as well as a visual representation of waveforms. It also needs to have a good range of input connectors.
Any recommendations appreciated.

[N i g e l]

whats wrong with a PC, A.I. & app like audactity or perhaps a more specialised 'scope app ?

[Folderol]

A word of advice. Don't even think of buying a digital oscilloscope. They are eye-wateringly expensive for what they are, and the display resolution is woefully inadequate for audio work. I get far better results with my trusty KA6 hanging off a laptop running at 96kHz.
Thinking about it, even a raspberry pi with appropriate software would do a better job!

[Arpangel]

whats wrong with a PC, A.I. & app like audactity or perhaps a more specialised 'scope app ?

Maybe I should have mentioned, looks are important, stand alone scopes look the part, and would fit in with my modular etc.

[Nazard]

Maybe I should have mentioned, looks are important, stand alone scopes look the part, and would fit in with my modular etc.

My old Telequipment D83 looks the part and is great for audio, no frequency readout, but I don't need that. I have a 200Mhz DSO which I use for RF but I wouldn't recommend for audio.

You can buy off the usual auction sites and take the risk, although many sellers have an incredibly overinflated view of a piece of equipment's worth. Or go to somewhere like Stewart of Reading and buy one of their 'special offer' 'scopes. To be honest, 'scopes are a bit of a minefield unless you know what you're doing.

[Folderol]

Maybe I should have mentioned, looks are important, stand alone scopes look the part, and would fit in with my modular etc.

My old Telequipment D83 looks the part and is great for audio, no frequency readout, but I don't need that. I have a 200Mhz DSO which I use for RF but I wouldn't recommend for audio.

Fond memories of this model. Used one where I worked (very) many days gone by

[Arpangel]

Maybe I should have mentioned, looks are important, stand alone scopes look the part, and would fit in with my modular etc.

My old Telequipment D83 looks the part and is great for audio, no frequency readout, but I don't need that. I have a 200Mhz DSO which I use for RF but I wouldn't recommend for audio.

You can buy off the usual auction sites and take the risk, although many sellers have an incredibly overinflated view of a piece of equipment's worth. Or go to somewhere like Stewart of Reading and buy one of their 'special offer' 'scopes. To be honest, 'scopes are a bit of a minefield unless you know what you're doing.

Thanks a lot, I’ll do a bit of searching and maybe run a couple by you before I buy one.

[Hugh Robjohns]

I need a proper large display, and one that shows a frequency read-out as well as a visual representation of waveforms. It also needs to have a good range of input connectors.
Any recommendations appreciated.

Have you considered the Korg NTS2? provided as a simple (plug together — no soldering) DIY kit and optimised for (unbalanced) stereo audio and CV/gate applications. Its about £150 and available from Amazon and Scan UK, amongst others...

https://www.korg.co.uk/products/nts2


It's a four-channel digital scope, with spectrum analyser and standard tuner functions, as well as a waveform generator. The colour screen is compact (2.8 inches), but appears to be very sharp and clear.

Powered via AAA batteries (around 2hr run time) or a USB-C wall wart / computer.

Dual stereo 3.5mm inputs, link thru outputs, and separate generator outputs. The thru outputs mean it can be permanently patched across the synth or mixer system output, which is handy.

I've just ordered one to review. Arrives tomorrow....

[Arpangel]

Just called Stewart of Reading, what a great chap! Probably going there sometime this week.



Hugh, I saw that too, look forward to your review.

[ajay_m]

If you want a serious scope capable of just about anything you'd want to throw at it - not to mention having great street cred when someone sees it on your bench - then the general consensus amongst the electronics and ham radio community I think is that the Siglent SDS1202X-E is probably the best bang for the buck. It still comes in north of £300 but it is a proper dual channel 200MHz scope with a much faster FPGA then the Rigol scopes and it has much larger storage buffers for capturing glitches etc.
When I were a young lad, a storage scope with these capabilities would set you back the price of a decent car.
If you want four channels there is a larger version but you obviously pay more.
I'm certainly very pleased with mine which has come in very useful in a range of projects and I don't find screen resolution an issue - you can zoom in on stuff and the resolution seems pretty good to me.
Of course you can pick up an old analogue scope for peanuts these days and before I bought the Siglent I had a lovely old HP scope that someone gave me which even after 40 odd years still worked perfectly, but it was much deeper than the Siglent, which occupies only a few inches of bench space, and didn't have the brilliant storage features.

[ajay_m]

At the other end of the scale the DSO Shell oscilloscope (see link below) at under £25 is actually an excellent little piece of kit, I got one for my grandson ages ago. You need a 9V PSU (not supplied) but they are so cheap a couple could just be permanently mounted into a rack setup with a bit of ingenuity.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/266494015054 ... R4qzu5e4Yw

[James Perrett]

I use a Philips badged Hameg 'scope but it does take up quite a bit of bench space - the CRTs in scopes tend to be very long so the case has to be very deep. I've used a variety of makes in the past and I'm more positive about digital scopes than Will. A £150 Rigol works amazingly well for the money although the display isn't as good at showing fine detail as something like a more expensive Keysight (formerly HP/Agilent) unit. The Keysight also gives you features like I2C decoding and logic analysis which don't necessarily appear on cheaper units.

I probably wouldn't go for one of the real cheapies as they only have a limited bandwidth and you can obtain similar results from the JS Oscilloscope plug-in in Reaper.

I've been eying up the Picoscope range because they give you all the features of an oscilloscope but in a much smaller form factor. They hook up to a computer via USB so you still have a decent size display. While the basic model is very cheap, more bandwidth and more facilities will bump the price up so I've held off buying one until I see what sort of projects my lad might be getting into.

[resistorman]

A word of advice. Don't even think of buying a digital oscilloscope. They are eye-wateringly expensive for what they are, and the display resolution is woefully inadequate for audio work. I get far better results with my trusty KA6 hanging off a laptop running at 96kHz.
Thinking about it, even a raspberry pi with appropriate software would do a better job!

I dunno, I bought this on sale for around $160 for my workbench. Though 100mhz dual trace is overkill just to look at synth waveforms. It does look official though

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B097T5NRTZ

[Folderol]

I've been eying up the Picoscope range because they give you all the features of an oscilloscope but in a much smaller form factor. They hook up to a computer via USB so you still have a decent size display. While the basic model is very cheap, more bandwidth and more facilities will bump the price up so I've held off buying one until I see what sort of projects my lad might be getting into.

Don't!
I bought one not long after they came out and tried it a couple of times then chucked in the back of a drawer.
It's only 8 bit resolution.

[Hugh Robjohns]

SOME are 8 bit resolution — generally the cheapest — although 8 bit is often perfectly acceptable.

The Picoscope 4000 series is 16bit resolution, and other model ranges are 12bit or variable resolution.

I bought a Picoscope to replace a dead Teletronix and I get on with it just fine. Far more practical for my needs, too, and with a useful signal generator built in.

[ajay_m]

Quite a lot of the high end scopes are 8 bit resolution. This doesn't mean that as you increase the channel sensitivity you get some horrible staircase waveform, this would make them useless as a professional instrument.
It just means that with the signal correctly scaled for full vertical resolution, this is 256 steps across about 120mm of vertical resolution or 0.5mm per step which is perfectly adequate.
If you then increase gain further e.g to focus on low amplitude signals they are scaled accordingly so it's not like an audio interface.

[Folderol]

SOME are 8 bit resolution... generally the cheapest.

The Picoscope 4000 series is 16bit resolution, and other model ranges are 12bit or variable resolution.

I bought a Picoscope to replace a dead Teletronix and I get on with it just fine. Far more practical for my needs, too.

Clearly they've improved dramatically, and I'm out of date - hardly surprising

P.S. As has the price to match

[Folderol]

Quite a lot of the high end scopes are 8 bit resolution. This doesn't mean that as you increase the channel sensitivity you get some horrible staircase waveform, this would make them useless as a professional instrument.
It just means that with the signal correctly scaled for full vertical resolution, this is 256 steps across about 120mm of vertical resolution or 0.5mm per step which is perfectly adequate.
If you then increase gain further e.g to focus on low amplitude signals they are scaled accordingly so it's not like an audio interface.

I'm quite well aware of that. But there are times when you need to see the entire waveform in high resolution, such as when you get a tiny moving blip that is clearly audible... sometimes. This might show up on a 16 bit machine, and if you are lucky even on a 12bit one, but certainly not on 8bit.

In our case it was a discontinuity in the mathematics against integer resolution (way above my pay grade).

[James Perrett]

SOME are 8 bit resolution — generally the cheapest — although 8 bit is often perfectly acceptable.

I was surprised that our expensive Keysight scope was only 8 bit resolution - although there appeared to be a very noticeable improvement over the cheap Rigol so maybe Keysight were doing something clever with those 8 bits to improve the apparent resolution.

[Folderol]

SOME are 8 bit resolution — generally the cheapest — although 8 bit is often perfectly acceptable.

I was surprised that our expensive Keysight scope was only 8 bit resolution - although there appeared to be a very noticeable improvement over the cheap Rigol so maybe Keysight were doing something clever with those 8 bits to improve the apparent resolution.

Some of them do interpolation between adjacent value to invent an intermediate one. Also some go further and use some form of 'trend' assessment, but while that makes things look nice, it really blurs the trace.

[Eddy Deegan]

Not really as a direct suggestion to Tony but in case anyone else interested in such things reads this, for some time now I've had a Mordax Data in my Eurorack and it's worth its weight in gold to me.

For musical purposes it's really useful. Much like the Korg Nu:Tekt NTS-2 that Hugh mentioned it tracks up to 4 sources simultaneously with colour and scaling for each, plus it can work as a pair of oscillators, four (quite configurable) clocks, quad tuner, LFO, spectral analyzer and spectrograph. It handles CV, audio, trigger or gate signals and the 4 thru jacks are buffered.

It's more expensive than the Korg but you get a lot for the money IMHO.

[ajay_m]

Higher end scopes typically offer bandwidths of 200MHz or greater and the ADC sample rates are enormous, hence I'm pretty sure 8 bits of resolution is pretty standard except for lower bandwidth instruments. To take the example earlier with a low level glitch, since any professional scope is at least two channels, you feed the signal to both, set one channel to show the waveform at full amplitude and then use the second channel to zoom in, thus the intrinsic resolution isn't a limiting issue. Each channel is a different colour, normally magenta and yellow respectively so you can easily extract the information you want.

[Arpangel]

I was told by a chap that analogue scopes are still preferred by some, for certain things, like distortion measurement, because they have a higher resolution than digital scopes? Not that that will affect me.

[Folderol]

To take the example earlier with a low level glitch, since any professional scope is at least two channels, you feed the signal to both, set one channel to show the waveform at full amplitude and then use the second channel to zoom in, thus the intrinsic resolution isn't a limiting issue. Each channel is a different colour, normally magenta and yellow respectively so you can easily extract the information you want.

This doesn't work when the glitch is moving relative to the waveform. i.e. is not part of it. Instead, you might get brief glimpses of it every couple of dozen scans... if you don't blink. Most of the time it will be outside the area you've zoomed in on.

A more general point about waveforms is that they can be quite deceptive. Taking something like Yoshimi AddSynth you can change the phase relationships of harmonics in ways that make them look totally different yet sound exactly the same.

[tea for two]

Was briefly looking into education sector oscilloscopes.
There's this analogue
https://www.science2education.co.uk/pro ... pes/EL1004
which looks as a rebadged Tenma 72-6800.

::

Although an ECG would be more useful to me right now