PC Oscilloscopes

Explain to the boss that a fiscally responsible management team would have some application in mind before buying equipment. Then hand him a list of equipment that you actually need along with estimates on how much time and money it would save...

mike

I'd love to have one small enough to toss into the laptop bag and just have in reach. None of the ones I've seen, though, have had front-end or sample rate specs that have really tempted me.

What you might look at instead (a lot depends on your applications, of course) is one of the Ant USB logic analyzer pods from Rocky Logic. I got one of the Ant-8 gadgets early on and it really does come in handy.

very

has

When

Some just don't want to understand.

Once we needed an AWG to supplement another one in an experiment. I found a good second market half priced one, about $5K. Despite it would've been more than paid back during the experiment, we almost had to hang the boss by the balls to make him buy it (co-signed letter by the 5 engineers working on the experiment stating that we _wanted_ it, otherwise we'll stop working on it...). Now, none of the 5 engineers work anymore for them.

That's common practice. But a different problem. I've been in situations where I managed the entire corporate engineering team and had ZERO signature authority. I couldn't buy a pencil. I complained...a few months later I was "granted with much fanfare" $100 signature authority. "Now you can go buy that pencil..."

If you wanna have some fun, designate 0.1% in your budget for petty cash. You'll hear the screams and moans from across the courtyard as the bean counters take it out...While they spend a cool million on landscaping.

This guy's problem is that his boss wants to buy stuff he can't identify a use for. Send me the money, I'll figger out something. mike

Another option to consider is a card-based scope that plugs into the motherboard. About twelve years ago we had one from Gagescope that worked pretty well.

Here is a 12-bit, 200 MHz bandwidth version from Gagescope:

Or you can select one with different specs:

To get a price, you'll need to fill out a form at their website.

HTH,

Mark

Elektor Electronics magazine did a nice survey of USB oscillocsopes in their September 2005 issue. A digital copy can be downloaded from

Richard

One of the biggest problems with these PC based scopes are the trigger circuits. (Or lack thereof). Since most (all ?) seem to sample data at a certain rate, and then try to trigger on the data after the fact, they are almost useless when wants to trigger on a glitch or some other event which is faster than the data that one wants to look at.

If one wants a portable scope, then buy a portable scope.

Regards Anton Erasmus

The good fature is the built in spectrum analyzer, but for wide dynamic range and one off pulses go analogue