Oscilloscope dealers in the US

No. So I just keyed "Instek" into their search. No articles found :-(

Then it said that my session has expired, whatever that means.

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I emailed someone who had taken a digital camera snapshot of a B model (obvious becuase the shot included enough bezel to see the USB port) and asked why she hadn't used the internal 'print' function. She said it took something like 30 seconds to capture the screen. That made me slightly less disappointed not to have a B, myself!

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Yeah, documentation somehow seems like an afterthought for designers of measurement tools. But at least it is possible. A digital transfer looks so much more professional than a camera snapshot of the screen. Most of these newer DSOs can store lots of pictures. When done with an analysis I need to write a report anyhow so it doesn't matter how long it takes to spool the stored images to a USB stick.

Right now I narrowed the search down to the Instek GDS-2204. Says it's full USB 2.0 whatever that means. But I want to find out before ordering.

Anyone have experience with Instek scopes? Not many reviews out there.

lack of

I just take a pic with my digital camera. I can scribble context notes on a post-it, stick that to the edge of the screen, and include that in the image. I can simultaneously snap pix of the setup or the breadboard or whatever, too. As far as "professional" goes, camera pix are usually plenty good enough; I like their "real" look.

John

lack of

Yeah, the "real look" does have an appeal to it. You could even enhance that by letting more of the screen surroundings show and then fuzzify it by fading towards the edges.

Anyhow, I have just ordered an Instek GDS-2204. Was unable to read its only manual because it's in some silly *.rar format that my PC doesn't grok. But other docs say that you can also connect a printer to its USB port, hit "print" and out comes the plot. That would be really nice here in the lab. Then I can scribble right onto the image itself. Things like "this here spike stinks" etc.

Most hams would typically buy used equipment, and usually not from a top-name dealer. Military/contractor and/or university surplus are common sources. A lot of the aerospace surplus stuff has dried up fast over the past couple of years.

Tucker Instruments (

Tim.

On Fri, 13 Jul 2007 15:03:23 GMT, Joerg wrote:

I'm still grappling with such questions. When I was growing up, there was a lot less manufactured goods available to buy inexpensively. So I suppose there is that as a factor in why kids growing up into that environment might prefer to buy instead of taking on all the trouble it takes to learn and build for one's self. The reason I bothered to learn higher mathematics and eventually calculus while still in high school was because I wanted to actually design my own telescope (I built three, designed two of them.) But I had to 'bang my head' against the wall for some time and why would a kid do that, intentionally, if there was a better option they could afford?

But that isn't everything. It's also the case that when there is ready manufactured goods available, the suppliers who used to be willing to supply hobbyist quantities of goods to a vibrant hobbyist market wind up losing their market. And when that happens, they go away. There used to be periodicals (I subscribed to, I think, 5 of them as a kid) focusing every issue on home construction of telescopes. All of them are gone. There is one remaining that used to do a monthly column on telescope making -- Astronomy -- which no longer does that. Instead, it is filled with ads for pre-made telescopes. Likewise, all of the suppliers of various kinds of raw glasses in hobbyist quantities are gone. The businesses left are asking for "how many tons of that glass would you like?" Anyone selling small quantities of glass is selling it as value-added glass: meaning that it is already made into lenses and so on. The point here is that not only does it become easy(ier) to buy pre-made products but it also becomes far harder then to leave the "beaten path" and do it yourself. In my day, doing a telescope on your own was a lot easier because you had lots of folks doing it and you could talk to them and maybe even get some help at times, you could access small quantities of glass in a form you could work with, etc. Now, it's a higher barrier to climb over as a hobbyist. So that means the market gets just that much smaller. It's a spiraling process.

The problem is... you need to keep the barriers lower, artificially if necessary, so that non-experts can find it easier to become experts, if they have some motivation to try.

Another part of it is that these things flow in ebbs and tides. A society may develop for a period many capable "builder types." They build and make things. Highway systems are created, train systems built, etc. And then, their children have access to these resources. Which means... their children (or grandchildren) find it in their own better personal interests to leverage their lives upon those important durable goods made by a prior generation. It pays them better to USE the highways, than to learn how to build them. And so there is a time lag in the response function and a generation loses interest in "keeping alive the knowledge." Which means it isn't deeply taught to the new generation. And then a minor or major 'collapse' takes place. New need is created, people begin to relearn again, infrastructure is created anew, etc.

Another part is the sheer numbers of people. The population of the world is 2.5 times what it was when I was born. There was a pyramid of sorts, with expert engineers as the top point of the pyramid and users of their goods as the base. Because of the smaller populations and the somewhat lower maturity of goods and services, many of the users were also part-time builders and had at least some passing experience with design issues. (Many hobbyist home-do-it-yourselfers who had put on their own roofs, for example.) With larger populations making the pyramid higher and with expert engineers creating a host of "pre-engineered" goods, a new middle layer develops of semi-engineers is created. People who design products for users, but who don't really need to know the deeper technical issues all that well and can design usable products, anyway. Not the best products, but usable ones. In electronics, this might be those who can use standardized ICs like TI's MSP430F4793 to make an energy meter. Someone else has already worked out the important details and packed all the necessary functions into a single IC.

Education, experience, and knowledge is very expensive to inculcate and maintain in a society.

Jon

is

Yes, that's it.

It's a beauty. Very light, and nothing since by other manufacturers comes close in terms of its ability to just close it and open it to come back exactly where you are at, instantly. Other companies have done things like save the memory to disk, but all this takes time and isn't certain (many, many times have I seen this botched because the user didn't wait long enough or some other problem forced the system to scrub everything and restart.) On the 300, when the phone rings or someone comes over to talk, you just close it. When the conversation is done, you just open it and go. No waiting. Those other companies have a LOT to learn about usability from the 300 (and, I gather, the

resurrect

I hope that works out well!

The 300 lasts a frightening long time on batteries, closed but ram maintained and available for instant use. I don't press it that much, but I recall experiencing something like 3-4 weeks in that state. On just a few AA batteries. All this before specialized low-power "portable products" cpus.

I really like having AA, though. This means that if I'm traveling, I can always find quick replacements. Even in some odd town in Ecuador or Nigeria. Security like that is important and one of the reasons I don't like custom battery systems.

Thanks for all this, James. I liked reading about this.

Jon

Jonathan -- very good article! I have a bit of a response...

Yeah, but think about how great a resource the Internet is for this sort of thing: You can now find kindered spirits worldwide with a few clicks in Google, even if your passion is designing, e.g., pendulum clocks made out of paper.

It seems as though the school systems today expect less out of students than they used to, even though they're often spending more per student now (in real dollars) than in years past.

---Joel

My sister is building a really big one. AFAIK she is polishing the huge mirror since what seems an eternity to me. And she ain't the only one.

We had one of those newfangled meters, remote readability and all that. Then the LCD finally said it had enough of that hammering sun light. Half of the display croaked. Guess what? PG&E replaced it with a "new" meter of really old technology. It has seven hands, like an old water meter.

Unless people re-learn how to pick themselves up by the bootstraps and develop some gusto again. The Internet is free and you don't have to bicycle through 5 miles of rain and hail to the next town anymore like we had to, because only they had a public library with a few EE books.

Well, it's for biz use. I just ordered an Instek GDS-2204 from Newark for around $1550. It'll be shipped from Farnell in Europe where for some reason that completely eludes me they charge their guys a whole lot more. On Farnell's German site I found a price of 1664 Euros and it must be the same batch because they list the same available quantity.

There are free utilities to decompress .rar files.

Completely off-topic, but the optional BIST stood right out at me. Why? Just curious.

Tangentially related, I thought I'd fish for opinions:

At work I've lately been using a Philips 3365. It's a 100MHz bench 'scope, two channel analog, plus 4096 byte DSO. Now that I've got the hang of it, it's quite handy. I mostly use the digital scale for measuring things, since it automatically does stuff like rise time and frequency.

Anyone else use one, or one in the series? I didn't find much about it online, at least in English.

Tim

-- Deep Fryer: A very philosophical monk. Website @

I do not understand this or the other thread at all.

There are only two types of oscilloscope: Tektronix and Shit.

With the partial exception of the HP 130-C. Which was the last decent scope HP ever built.

The engineers in these large companies design what they're told to design.

-a

Do you mean why BIST, or why optional? It's optional to make more money!

John

Optional.

BIST is normally added to make diagnostics cheaper, for the manufacturer. The user doesn't usually care. I just thought it a bit of a strange option. It's more common to have it there but hidden from the user; none of their business. ;-)

It does.

Some of my aerospace customers run very high-value tests. A jet engine test may use $50 million worth of gear and have 150 staff and witnesses present. They don't like to postpone or repeat stuff like this, so it's worth it for them to be able to verify the test gear before a run. We think of BIST as intellectual property that we can get paid for by the people who need it, sort of like Microsoft setting a byte to turn XP into XP Pro.

At the system level, BIST helps find and fix faults.

Typically, maybe 1/3 of our customers buy modules with BIST enabled.

John