Hi forum,
Here's another DS2072 owner de-lurking. I got mine a couple of days ago. Ended up to DS2072 mostly because of the information here. Thank you all! I ordered the scope (and another to my workmate) from silcon.cz. What a pleasure to buy from someone who knows his products. All my questions were answered quickly and friendly. No problems with the delivery, either.
My initial impression of the device has been good. Very nice upgrade from DS1052E. First things to notice are the large screen and the temperature controlled fan. You can hear the fan when the unit warms up but it doesn't disturb that much. And having separate knobs for both channels in the vertical system is a relief. At least after I learn to find the horizontal knobs from a new place. Already too many times I've been puzzled for a moment when trying to use CH2 scale for adjusting time/div... Oh, well
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One of the features my old scope didn't have is the trigger output. I'm interested in using a scope in combination with a PC based logic analyzer. Getting them both triggered synchronously from an analog signal is going to be great. To play a little I made a quick setup where the scope was triggered to a 10Hz square wave from a signal generator on CH1. Then I connected the trigger output to CH2. The output delay seems to be about 220 ns with some jitter in it. Changing to 5ns/div and infinite persistence showed that the jitter is bounded within an about 8 ns window. Something in the scope clocked at 125MHz? Anyway, the frequencies of the signals I mostly work with are way lower. And the inexpensive USB based logic analyzer I use doesn't sample that fast anyway.
By the way, I had to use a second scope to get the width of the trigger output pulse measured. It seems to correlate with the time/div setting and the memory depth in use. When I first increased the waveform length of the DS2072 trying to get the falling edge on the screen, it got again pushed out of reach
. They mention in the user's manual that the trigger out can be used to find out the capture rate. Could it be so that the signal could also be used to determine if the scope is busy? That might be useful in some mixed signal debugging cases. A microcontroller could start something only when the scope is ready to capture. I wonder if the dead time is included in that... Maybe I'll continue comparing the trigger pulse length to the length of the captured waveform. And could try to increase the frequency of the input signal so that its period gets closer to the pulse width of the trigger output.