Mid range scope dilemma (sub £1000/$1600)

[AMS]

Hi all

I recently decided to upgrade my scope due to some problems that I had with my current scope while I was working on my last project. I currently have an OWON SDS7102V which is a 100MHz 2ch 1GSa/S. It is a relatively good scope for the price and I was happy with it however the following are the reasons that i am looking for a new scope:

1. I ideally want to have four channels as I design board with digital bus in them quit often and it would be nice to be able to troubleshoot them on the scope
2. I would like to have serial decode (I currently use a logic analyser (saleae)) and it would be nice to do it on one device

I have a budget of 1000£/1600$  currently I am looking at
Siglent SDS2104 at £900
Rigol DS1104Z-S (with function generator) at £712
Rigol DS2102A with all options £874 I know its a 2ch but its a good one

I would greatly appreciate it if you can help me to choose the best one for the price. Or if you know of any other scope which is not listed above.

[tautech]

Shame you missed the recently ended Siglent SDS2000 series promotions then. 

BW upgrade to the next model up, in your case the SDS2204 and buy MSO and get options Decode and AWG free.
With the new SDS2000 V2 FW there will be an additional option of 70 Mb memory:
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/siglent's-new-product-msosds2000-series/msg754971/#msg754971

[nctnico]

In this price/performance range I'd definitely look for a second hand Agilent / Keysight 2000 or 3000 series. Those are a much safer bet!

[Wuerstchenhund]

£1000/$1600 won't buy you a new mid-range scope (which start at roughly 3x your budget), so you're stuck with either new low-end scopes or used mid-range models.

The models you listed are the former. I'd stay away from the Siglent SDS2000 for now as the firmware is still full of bugs, and while Siglent has promised (again) to come up with an all-solving firmware update I wouldn't hold my breath.

The Rigol DS1000z is a great bottom-of-the-barrel scope (although a hacked DS1054z will save you some money over a DS1104z) which still seems to suffer from various bugs, and as you said the DS2102A is a 2ch scope so it won't solve your problem. All Rigols have in common that serial decode is pretty primitive.

Overall I'd concur with ntnico that a second hand Agilent/Keysight DSOX2000 or DSOX3000A is probably a much safer bet than the buggy scopes from the Chinese B-brands.

[SteveLy]

For your needs the Rigol MSO1000 series might be worth considering.

[artag]

I haven't tried the latest scopes, but I have an Agilent 7014A which includes hardware decode of serial streams and can therefore trigger on I2C addresses, etc.

It's a pleasure to use and good at what it does .. but it doesn't replace the Saleae. The ease of skimming through long captures and decoding multiple streams on a PC screen (even though the Saleae has very crude triggering and searching) can't be compared with trying to pan and zoom through the Agilent's smaller capture memory.

I wouldn't be without a proper benchtop scope and I think mixed-signal analysis is a great addition. But don't expect it to replace the little $100 Saleae for protocol analysis. (Yes, i know you can get the cloned hardware for $5. It's the software, and a platform to run it with fast video updates and well-designed mouse controls that makes it good).

[nctnico]

I wouldn't write off the Keysight scopes yet. When hacked you can enable circular segmented recording. I recently used that to track down a nasty I2C problem where every now and then (say once an hour) a value would be read wrong.

[Pinkus]

Overall I'd concur with ntnico that a second hand Agilent/Keysight DSOX2000 or DSOX3000A is probably a much safer bet than the buggy scopes from the Chinese B-brands.

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