I will not buy any fancy or expensive probe just yet, but since I still need a cheap-ish pair for a FNIRSI scope I will probably buy a pair of the Uni-T or the P2200 probes that I can easily get from AliExpress at a reasonable price.
Okay. One question though: How many probes do you own right now? How many do you use at one time, even if using 2 scopes?
You will likely eventually buy those nice probemaster probes, and then you'll have a few extra "cheaper" probes magically available. 😉
I have exactly enough probes for every oscilloscope I own. No "spares" per se.
A lot of the probes don't see a lot of use, though. Partly because I have several scopes that I don't use often, but also because I normally don't do more than 1 or 2 channel measurements, even on the 4-channel scopes I own.
Now, all the probes I have on the low-end and portable devices are generic, unbranded cheap probes that either came with them, or I bought separately, and only one pair of them has a performance so bad that I will probably be replacing them soon. I wouldn't use them on my main scopes.
My "main" scopes, however, is where I want the "quality" probes; A Rigol DS1054Z (4 channels, 100Mhz) and my newly acquired Keysight DSO2000X 200Mhz scope.
The Keysight, despite having been upgraded to 200Mhz, came with the 150 Mhz stock probes (because the seller sold me the unit "as it came in the box").
The Rigol has "mostly" the stock probes too, but they are already good enough for the unit (150Mhz probes on a 100Mhz scope).
Why "Mostly" on the Rigol? Well, that's where the RP3300A 350Mhz probe comes from. I was
unlucky enough to get a defective probe with my Rigol DS1054Z. The probe was working fine in 1x, but it was dodgy af and barely working on 10x (bad switch contact). When I approached my local distributor with the issue they told me they didn't have stock of the original probes and offered me the RP3300A instead, so technically my DS1054Z has only 3 perfectly working "stock" probes, one probe that is "1x only" (which I probably should've thrown away), and the RP3300A which is a bit too much for the scope so I normally don't use it unless I truly need 4 channels on that one scope.
If any of those probes were to fail, I would be left with not enough probes for all my scopes (although assuming some level of compatibility between them I could "borrow" a probe from another scope and use it. It's *not* like I need
all my scopes, with
all of their channels, simultaneously ).
So;
TLDR? I have barely enough probes for my scopes. One of them is an oddball that is not "factory supplied" but became my higher performance probe. How many do I regularly use? like 2 or 3
