I think the model of my $250 scope is HP 54542A. Four channels, 500 MHz, many nice digital functions.
I remember that scope model, we had several of them at work (mostly the C version with color LCD) when they were new (they were upper midrange scopes back then, not high end scopes btw), and I owned one personally years ago. They were good scopes back in the early '90s but technology has moved on
*a lot* since 1994, and its specs (tiny 32k/ch memory, 512pts FFT, sluggish update rate) can't hold a candle to even a $350 DS1054z of 2020.
They also weren't the most reliable scopes either (we had several issues with dying PSUs and ADCs, as well as intermittent channel loss due to the fragile spring connectors for the ADC hybrids).
$250 isn't a lot of money and if you mostly need the BW then it's not a bad option but if not then I'd rather buy something else.
Digital scopes are fine for someone with a bit of experience. For a beginner, I think analog works better, as much can be intuitive that doesn't go on digital.
That's a bit like arguing young doctors should first learn about alchemy and blood letting before moving on to modern medicine.
For a beginner who doesn't want to become a curator of a test equipment museum (or dabble in voodoo HiFi
) and just wants to learn how to handle a scope it doesn't make much sense to learn the operation of a technology which has been obsolete for almost two decades. Instead of wasting time learning how to work around the various limitations of an analog scope and the associated techniques (many of which are inefficient or even counter-productive on a DSO), it makes much more sense to start with something which isn't a technological dead end and use the time to learn how to handle a digital scope properly.
Even Dave has stopped recommending analog scopes as starter scopes years ago because it no longer makes sense when even the bottom-of-the-barrel DSOs are so much better.
Let's relax a bit here. This is a list of opinions, not facts. It's a hobby for many of us, so it's not like we are trying to get a product out fast or test production quantities of units.
That may well be but doesn't change the fact that even a hobbyist is much better served to start into electronics with a digital scope and learn how to handle that than to get an obsolete analog clunker, learn obsolete techniques and then re-learn a large part of it again when finally moving to a DSO. This would be borderline self-flagellation.
Because let's face it, the remaining global stock of analog scopes is rapidly shrinking, and it's shrinking because analog scopes are no longer made and pretty much every analog scope has already passed it's design life. So unless one is interested in vintage test gear (some people are) there is no reason why a beginner should start with an obsolete analog clunker.
I have been around the block a few times myself, and have owned an electronics business for a number of years. I have used analog and digital and designed a few as well. I have an EE degree from many years ago.
Good for you.
I've started with analog scopes myself (back in the '80s) as a hobby and later used them at work, but when the first digital scopes came on the market I quickly moved on (unlike many of my colleagues, of which many were pretty negative or down-right hostile to digital scopes). I moved on simply because I got vastly more information from the digital scope than any analog scope could give me, which made my work a hole lot easier. And this was back then when DSOs were still rather simple (even more so than your 54542A), but I did spend the time to learn how these scopes work and quickly understood that the methodology I knew from analog scopes won't get me very far, and it paid off. Many of my colleagues struggled to get on with DSOs, because they only saw them as a bad copy of an analog scope, and they treated it like an analog scope, something I have later seen with many other engineers who spend most of their time with analog scopes. Don't get me wrong, many were great EEs and knew their stuff, but they were also completely ignorant as to DSOs or how they work. Because they failed to see that a DSO isn't just a slighly newer analog scope, it's a different kind of tool (a waveform analyzer) which requires pproper handling and techniques to get the most out of it.
Later in years when I started doing a lot of hiring we had a little test for applicants where we setup a bench with a scope and a simple circuit or generator producing some pulse trains or even just a square wave, and then asked the applicant to determine some basic signal parameters (i.e. rise/fall times, voltage levels, PRF/PRT and so on, really simple stuff). You could instantly identify the ones that spent most of their time working with analog scopes when the guy started looking for cursors or began counting the graticule units, which was a clear sign that the applicant had very little understanding for how to get information out from a modern DSO. Thankfully in recent years this has become rare as engineers and now even hobbyists (who may well decide to turn the hobby into a career) are learning on digital scopes.
So no, I would not recommend for a beginner, no matter if hobbyists or professional, to start with an analog scope, I recommend to get a decent entry-level DSO and spend time to learn how it works (and not use instructions designed for analog scopes when doing so), where its limits are and how to handle it properly to get the most information out of it with the least effort.
Even less so when there was never a better time than today for a hobbyist to get a sophisticated digital scope for little money.
Home
Help
Search
Login
Register
