Philips PM-3218 Oscilloscope

[Dellyjoe]

hello everyone im just starting out in Electrical Engineering and my mom's friend found out that im studying EE and he found this, witch i don't have any test equipment other then an BK precision multimeter so i picked it up.

My questions are should i keep this? Is this a good one to still be using i know it is old.


Here are some pics.

[madshaman]

Dunno, only thing that might limit you is that 35Mhz bandwidth.  I'll bet it'll still show you decent signals up to 70+Mhz if you're lucky.

I don't know what kind of circuitry you want to build, but if you'll be interested mainly in logic levels and you're not working with high speed digital, like 100s of Mhz, it might do you just fine for everything.

Just my two cents.

[c4757p]

Beauty. You've even got a delayed timebase. 35 MHz is a bit low but you can work with it.

[Dellyjoe]

thank you everyone having a hard time understand what you are all saying. i just need to get my feet wet with everyone EE.

[ElectroIrradiator]

For the love of [preferred deity], keep that thing!

For sure it won't fulfill every oscilloscope need you may ever have down the road, but if it works reliably, then it is a great starter scope. Among other things, then it is kinda hard to accidentally burn the inputs out if you are unlucky with some connections, perfect for a beginner.

More to the point: If you, as a beginner, is doing something that scope can't cope with, then you are probably in way over your head.

Also, once you do hit its limitations, then you will be in a much better position to judge what its successor should be capable of. In all likelihood you will decide to keep the old scope, as there are problems they still excel at, even when faced down by modern, kilobucks digital oscilloscopes.

[Dellyjoe]

For the love of [preferred deity], keep that thing!

For sure it won't fulfill every oscilloscope need you may ever have down the road, but if it works reliably, then it is a great starter scope. Among other things, then it is kinda hard to accidentally burn the inputs out if you are unlucky with some connections, perfect for a beginner.

More to the point: If you, as a beginner, is doing something that scope can't cope with, then you are probably in way over your head.

Also, once you do hit its limitations, then you will be in a much better position to judge what its successor should be capable of. In all likelihood you will decide to keep the old scope, as there are problems they still excel at, even when faced down by modern, kilobucks digital oscilloscopes.

Thanks electroIrradiator im now reading the manual to find out how to use this thing.

[mzacharias]

The Philips analogs are decent but the controls get VERY scratchy and are difficult to get to to clean (but no worse than a lot of other brand scopes).

I use a 50mHz delayed sweep Philips and a 25mHz basic model daily.

Once serviced, no complaints. They were both over 20 years old when I got them.

Definitely keep for now; it's considered that everyone needs at least one analog scope.