Yeah, the Acquiris boards are too pricy, although I've seen old PCI versions with 2GSPS/500MHz on ebay for 300ish.
Well, as I mentioned above. I suspect those "cheap" boards are untested and won't even be supported on any recent hardware and software...
I have a 350MHz/2.5GS scope available, so I could go that route. That's enough for low-resolution stuff.
Obviously start with that, at least to see what you're dealing with. It would at least help selecting a more appropriate equipment if needed.
From my understanding (not an expert either) time-of-flight mass spectrometers do a bunch of runs and average them.
So far I've only seen time of flight specs use single-shots. I'm not sure if an ETS will work, but in theory it should.
(Now that I think about it, the trigger rate is probably going to be in the 20Hz region---too slow for an ETS to get a good signal in a reasonable timeframe)
The 3 above sentences look a bit contradictory to me (but I may miss something!)
If you need "a bunch of runs and average them", that's a very typical use of a sampling oscilloscope (/ETS mode). Sounds contradictory with the single-shot acquisitions in itself.
The trigger rate is not relevant? If you need a bunch of averaged runs, you'll need them whatever the trigger rate is. It's just going to take a while.
I don't know how many runs would typically need to be averaged, so I don't know whether using single-shot acquisitions and averaging them would make any difference with ETS in terms of total acquisition time. Some real figures would help.