Is the pico scope 2204A good enough for electronics?

[Hullen]

I work in heavy equipment and I have a pico scope 2204A that I use occasionally for diagnostics. I am curious if this would also be useful for general electronics use. I am just getting into electronics as a hobby and if this scope would be decent starting out, then maybe I can spend my money on something else. What do you guys think?

[Muxr]

They are well regarded scopes. Your model is a bit of an entry level scope 10Mhz and 100 megasamples/s (though with repetitive signals it can do 1Gs/s).

But yes, it's enough to do general electronics with.

[ejeffrey]

The 2204 is pretty low end, it's quite limited in both bandwidth and memory depth.  I wouldn't recommend someone getting into electronics buy it, instead spend money elsewhere or save up for a better scope.

But since you already have it, the price is right and it's a perfectly servicable piece of equipment.  It's totally fine for a lot of audio frequency analog and some low speed digital work, although for digital you may have to be clever to work around the sample memory limit. 

So I'd say spend your money elsewhere and upgrade later.  That will also give you a chance to consider whether you want a fancier computer based scope or want to move to a bench top scope. 

[Gyro]

You would be best to download the Picoscope s/w and try it in demo mode. It is 'different' to most scope UIs, eg. the display scaling is in volts rather than volts per division. You'll either like it or not, it's a personal thing.

[BeBuLamar]

I have 4 of them. I think if you work with high frequency stuff then it's not good. For me it's fine as I never work on stuff with high frequency. I work on audio circuit and motor drive etc.. and 10Mhz is plenty. The scaling is fine for me the one thing I don't like is that I can't offset it to bring the 0 line close to the bottom or top to have more space to observe the top half or bottom half of the waveform.

[Gyro]

If you're restricted to this price band, and USB, you might want to consider something like the Owon VDS1022I as an alternative. It's been around for years now, do a forum search for the mega teardown thread. The stock s/w is ok, but there is also an alternative s/w on github which adds useful features and shortcuts, together with bug fixes.

As with all things, there are trade-offs, the Owon gives you greater 25MHz analogue bandwidth but same sample rate (100MS/s per channel simultaneously) [EDIT: Looking at the spec sheet, the 2204A appears to be 100MS/s one channel and only 50MS/s two channels? That would explain the 10MHz bandwidth figure, I've never noticed that before]. The VDS1022 'I' version gives you galvanic isolation of the USB port (for computer protection, not elevated voltage operation!), it is also very light on resources - USB2 Full speed rather than High speed. On the flip side, its buffer is a bit smaller (5k vs 8k) and it lacks data decoding facilities. Both have FFT though. You can download the s/w and get a feel for the UI, but it doesn't have a demo mode. The Pico s/w is more feature rich (you share the s/w features of the higher end models), but as I say, a bit different in UI terms, it also includes an AWG (the Owon has trigger in/out).

I don't know if that gives you an outright winner. You are looking at the bottom of the price range, so it's going to depend on your priorities and look at the s/w. They're both capable scopes though, that work as advertised. Avoid Hantek USB scopes, they aren't in the same league, are feature limited and often don't meet their performance specs. You could maybe look at some of the recent low-end handhelds, but screen size is small of course and I think the half decent ones are more expensive than the 2204A.

[BeBuLamar]

I must say I like the Picoscope 2204 a lot.

[ejeffrey]

If you're restricted to this price band, and USB, you might want to consider something like the Owon VDS1022I as an alternative.

The OP already has the picoscope and is deciding whether to keep using it or buy a higher end product, not deciding between different low end USB scopes.

[donlisms]

Spend your money on something else for now.  Test gear has a way if talking to you through the ether...  "You know, if you had another power supply, you could do this extra thing," or "You know, if you had a couple more digits your meter, you could be a little more confident this thing is working right."

Same with a scope or anything else. It will tell you when it's time to move on up.

[Gyro]

The OP already has the picoscope and is deciding whether to keep using it or buy a higher end product, not deciding between different low end USB scopes.

Sorry, I misread that as a work (owned) scope. Yes, spend your money elsewhere.

[Hullen]

Thank you all for your input. Sorry for the delayed response. I did end up buying a little POS power supply for the bench off of Amazon. It’s a 30v 10amp wanptek(I think is the brand?). Anyways I’m literally just getting into this so I’m sure it will do me for a bit. I’ve also been kinda looking into function generators but that will be a bit down the road (at least that’s what I’m trying to convince myself)

[p.larner]

pico scopes seem a bit like a ruggedised lappy,ie overpriced + poor spec but built like a tank,buy a rigol or a s/h tek 465 for example.

[jasonRF]

Thank you all for your input. Sorry for the delayed response. I did end up buying a little POS power supply for the bench off of Amazon. It’s a 30v 10amp wanptek(I think is the brand?). Anyways I’m literally just getting into this so I’m sure it will do me for a bit. I’ve also been kinda looking into function generators but that will be a bit down the road (at least that’s what I’m trying to convince myself)

The function generator built into the 2204a might be fine for starters.  It is limited to +/-2V output and a max sinusoid frequency of 100kHz, but for basic learning and low-frequency projects it works well.

[MathWizard]

woops, picoscope, not pico-amp-meter