8 Oscilloscopes reviewed…

8 Oscilloscopes under €400 – Nut & Bolt via Dangerous Prototypes –

An oscilloscope is an essential tool when trying to understand what is going on inside your electronics. It is an expensive piece of kit: even a simple model costs several hundreds of euros/dollars. While it is possible to buy great second-hand analog oscilloscopes for a lot less, they are very bulky and don’t have the digital storage capabilities of modern oscilloscopes. In this post I’ll list the sub-€400 digital storage oscilloscopes I evaluated before purchasing one for Nut & Bolt.

1 GS/s Digital Storage Oscilloscope + Extras. The ultimate debugging tool for electronics, this oscilloscope will turn you into a “Circuit Whisperer”. You will be able to peer into the workings of your circuits to better understand them. Difficult problems will suddenly become trivial. We tried many beginner oscilloscopes and found this one to be a perfect balance of price and function: it’s perfect as a ‘first scope’ or as a hacker-space resource to share. To learn about how to use oscilloscopes, we suggest reading Tektronix’s great “XYZs of Oscilloscopes” and the other great Tek documents that cover everything you need to know!

One of the cool things about this scope is that people have ‘hacked’ it to do awesome stuff like play Pong! There are many other “hacks” too, we picked this scope because if it’s hack-a-bility!

Bonus extras! we include an awesome sew/iron-on embroidered “Oscilloscope Skill Badge” and vinyl sticker!

1 Giga-sample per second Analog/Digital Converter – 1000 MSa/s real-time sample rate for one channel or 500 MS/s for two channels gives you the most detail even at high frequency signals
50 MHz software bandwidth (you can view up to 50 MHz digital/analog signals clearly)
5.7″ Full color LCD display
Digital storage with 16 Kpoints memory depth, 1Mpoints for long memory
Trigger via Edge, Pulse Width, Video, Slope, Alternate, Pattern and Duration
20 types of wave parameter measurements built in: Vmax, Vmin, Vpp, Vtop, Vbase, Vamplitude, Vaverage, Vrms, Overshoot, Preshoot, Period, Freq, Rise time, Fall time, + Width, – Width, + Duty, – Duty, Delay falling, Delay Rising, Phase falling, Phase Rising
Auto trigger/display is great for beginners
Math and FFT functions
Comes with two 100MHz probes with color tabs and adjustment tool
Plug in a USB key and save waveforms as a CSV or bitmap. Also lets you save your setup in case you have a testing jig you want to recreate
Isolated Pass/Fail output BNC
External trigger in
RS-232 and USB B connector for remote control via a computer using NI VISA, LabVIEW, Visual Basic or Visual C (examples included on CD)
Ultrascope software for PC control
Powers via a standard computer power cable, 100-240VAC
Lightweight, 2.5 kg makes it easy to carry around wherever you need it!
Comes with the latest hardware revision HW58 and firmware v2.06