Electronics > Beginners
Philips PM3207 or cheap DSO kit as first scope
AmrasElensar:
Hi all,
I’m looking for my first scope to experiment a bit, mostly while doing Arduino and Rpi projects. Or for trying to find issues when trying to repair old electronics.
I can pick up and old pm3207 scope for 15€ without a probe. The guy selling it doesn’t know anything about it but the picture at least shows a horizontal trace.
My question is: should I still get this or maybe one of those cheap diy kits like from jyetech? (Dso138 mini or so)
Other suggestions always welcome.
Thanks in advance
Maarten
janoc:
If that old PM3207 scope works then do get that. That's a decent scope for a beginner and the price is a steal. Probes can be obtained online cheaply, for a 15MHz scope you don't need anything expensive.
The cheap DIY kit "scopes" are toys that are very much completely useless - very low bandwidth (often in tens of kHz tops), low sampling rate, lack proper probes, horrendous user interface, etc. I have tested one, it wasn't able to show even a 20kHz sine wave properly - i.e. useless even for audio. Those gadgets are just a microcontroller with an LCD using the internal ADC for digitizing the signal + power regulator and a few buttons. Don't waste your time and money on that.
Later on start saving and you can get a very good modern digital scope for some 300-400 euro already - that is more useful for digital stuff because you get single shot captures, you get various serial protocol decoders, etc.
Mr. Scram:
Get the real oscilloscope. The DSO138 is a fun thing, but hardly a real oscilloscope. It also is limited in ways that can be confusing to the uninitiated.
Gyro:
Get the real PM3207 scope. Do some checks to make sure it's working - a simple piece of wire from the input connector center pin to the Probe Adj. terminal will show you whether it can display a waveform. As janoc says, you can pick up low frequency (probably 60MHz) probes very cheaply on ebay etc.
--- Quote from: janoc on August 24, 2018, 04:41:20 pm ---Later on start saving and you can get a very good modern digital scope for some 300-400 euro already - that is more useful for digital stuff because you get single shot captures, you get various serial protocol decoders, etc.
--- End quote ---
Pick up one of those cheap 8 bit USB logic analyzer clones for around EUR10, use it with open source Sigrok Pulseview and it will cover all your needs for capturing land decoding data streams and protocol decoding on the Arduino etc. That way you will have the best of both worlds at very little cost, you can look at both the Analogue and Digital domains.
AmrasElensar:
Thank you all for your quick responses and insights. My gut was telling me to go for the real scope as well. Waiting for a response from the seller now.
I’ll look in to those Logic analyzers as well.
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