Dave, Here's hoping you read through every single sob story, and if you do, you are a greater man than most. Also, I realize I don't have more than 50 posts as of the time of this posting, but I joined with the sole intention of becoming part of this great community. Soon enough that post count will climb, and with it my knowledge will grow. So I hope you don't mind that my post count is a bit low.
To start things off, a story, of 2 year old me. When I was a young lad I too had an odd knack for taking things apart and seeing what made them tick. My mother swears to this day that when I was 2, I took apart an old toy radio of mine that didn't work, did something inside, put it back together and whala it started working again. Whether or not it's true is solely on her, as I don't really remember that. What I do remember is an old Electric Organ my father brought home one day that he found in the trash. Needless to say it was in the trash for a reason, it didn't work. At the time I had to be 4 or 5 years old. I just know I wasn't in school yet. My mother wanted to get rid of the old thing since it didn't work, and I wanted to tinker around in the back of it. So she said why not, and let me do it. Figuring I'd break it more and we'd have to throw it out. I think there may have been some wires that were loose back there or something, I don't remember what I did, but I told my mother that it was fixed, and she wanted to wait till my father got home to plug it in. He did, and sure enough the thing turned on and actually played.
Now come to the present and I'm about 30 years old. My whole life I've been tinkering with electronics. Mostly just taking stuff apart to see what was inside, without actually knowing how anything worked. I found myself mostly on the computer Hardware side of things. As repairing computers came naturally. However, computer's don't really challenge me anymore, as for the most part it's all module, and hard to mess up an installation. That's where electrical engineering comes into play. I've always had an interest in it, just never dived right in. Well I'm already off the diving board, I'm setting up a small little lab in the garage and already started working on repairing some of the projects that I've had sitting around for way to long. I even posted about it on the
"Whats your Work-Bench/lab look like?" thread. However as you can see I don't have an Oscilloscope, surely this is a great shame.
For the time being I can't really afford a digital scope, at least not anything that is reliable. I'm in the process of getting a DSO150 kit from BangGood, whenever that decides to show up and hoping I put it together perfectly, and all the parts come in good shape and it doesn't just fry on me after a week of use.
It'll help me diagnose some issues that I'm having with a TI-83+ Calculator I'm trying to repair. Granted it's up to the job, but realistically it's only a temporary solution. Now I'm sure there are tons of people here that would love a new scope to add to their collection, or even upgrade from a scope they currently have, but I need a scope to further my knowledge into the world of Electrical Engineering, as I know this will be the place to challenge my mind, and a place to further my career choices in. I'm definitely going to be doing this for a long long time. Hell I've already been doing it along time, and I don't see that changing any time soon. Some projects that it will come really useful in are in RC, Diagnostics for audio and repairs. I've got several repair projects that I need to diagnose the pwm signal of a mcu. I'm trying to develop my own video camera, and it'll really come in handy with that. There's no short of projects and an oscilloscope would be used regularly.
Lastly I'd like to thank Dave himself for hosting such an amazing community, your blogs are wonderful, I find myself up late at night watching them. I've been watching for a while, at least a couple years and don't know why I didn't do it sooner, but recently decided to join up in the community. So thank you for sharing your knowledge with everyone, and thank you for having a great giveaway like this!