Hello,
I received today my first oscilloscope and I am really excited!
Its a really nice tool.
The quality of its construction is quite good actually. The plastics feel nice, and do not have any
annoying smell. The knobs are very good, except the small ones that could have been a bit more
solid.
photo hostingI had no problem with the layout of the knobs apart from the general purpose (intensity/adjust)
that is too close to the big vertical Volts dial. They had so much space above it, but they decided
to put it as close as they could to the vertical... Go figure...
how to take screenshotsThe big knobs feel very nice indeed and I love that they all have a push to center function.
It would have been a lot better design if all the knobs were the same as they big ones!
All the little rubber buttons are great, they have a positive feel and they are very well lit.
The On/Off switch is very springy and quite hard to press.
how to print screen on pcAll the connectors, USB, BNC, etc feel solid. Very nice.
how to do a screen shotThe display is very crisp and has excellent viewing angles. You can see the pixels, so in the
same space they could have used a higher resolution one. The display is for bench use only
because it goes dark fast if you look at it from below the horizontal. From any other angle
its excellent! I have not yet removed the protective cover from the screen but it looks like
that the lcd is protected with a glass. Very nice.
The little plastic feet work fine. When they are closed, the unit feels like that will fall on its
face because its a bit heavy in front. So, you should use it all the time with the plastic feet
extended.
The probes feel a little cheap and fragile and this is probably because they are...
Having said that, I did not have any problems with them all day today. Maybe they will
show their quality in the Mhz range. They were calibrated very easily.
image hosting 12mbSome measurements.- Power Consumption : 18.7 Watts
- Temperature : from 23 degrees Celcius ambient to 34 degrees after one hour of use.
The hottest part is the right side.
- Time to boot : 9 seconds.
- Time to Auto trigget its own signal : 5 seconds. It can become much slower with different signals.
- You can hear a relay clicking when you change from 200mV to 500mV and from 50ns to 100ns
- Software Version : 5.01.02.13
- Hardware Version : 11-62-3.3
- Sound Noise : Its a very quiet oscilloscope! My house is very quite. From a background noise
floor of 34.3dbC it goes to 49.6dbC 20cm from the actual fan.
One negative thing I found in the few hours I've played with it is that if you switch it off and then on
with a USB stick plugged in, it will not recognize it until you unplug it and plug it again.
Very annoying! I think that this should be fixed in the next firmware version.
Other negative is that when you turn the vertical and horizontal dials, the indicator lines are lagging.
They are not instant and the waveform takes some time to be displayed again. Definitely something
that needs to be fixed.
Some screen captures of different signals:
Its own 1kHz signal:
image hosting over 10mbSeveral PWM ones:
image upload no adsimage url uploadimage uploading sitehow to make screen shotimage hosting 10mb limitimage hosting no accountBellow you can see a very nice sinewave with the probes not connected to anything...
50Hz, so its picking the mains frequency somehow.
Do you know how can I prevent this?
When I moved it to a different room it stopped.
upload photosNow if I switch on the main light of the room I get the following signal.
Its not like that actually, because if I turn on 5sec persistence I can see two different 50hz signals.
I can also see spikes when I turn on & off some lights in the room.
screen capture windows 7So, these are my first impressions of the oscilloscope and I would have to say that in general
they are positive.
If you have any questions that I can help with, please feel free to ask.
Any suggestions for testing the oscilloscope functionality are welcomed.
Thank you.
George.