Hi all,
I'm thinking of buying this scope. Has anyone in this group bought this? What do U all think of it?
I'm a hobbyist, working with simple analog ccts and ATMEL AVR sereis uCs.
Had anyone had any problem working only with a single channel? I really
prefer to have two, but I can't go for a APS230 - too expensive
Anyone has any idea on other similar products less than $300?
Please comment, Harshana
At $300 for a handheld scope, it's not a bad deal It's lower-performance than Fluke scopemeters etc, but it's a lot cheaper too.
The lack of a second channel is a serious impediment to a lot of repair and design work where differential timing is relevant. If you are building PIC circuits from scratch and they aren't interfacing to many real-world things then it's not so bad because you can write test code that makes diagnostic waveforms that don't generally require two traces. It's unclear from my reading of the HPS40 specs if it is one analog channel with a separate connector for a trigger or just one input used for both trigger and amplitude... in many cases having a separate trigger input is as good as a second channel, in other cases it's not enough, it depends on what you're doing.
In the US, used two-channel analog scopes are available from $5 (an old beater good for seeing audio waveforms) to the low hundreds of $ (A Tek
465B, 2215, etc. good to 60 or 100 MHz, possibly with calibration). I greatly prefer analog scopes myself, just my personal frustration with the interfaces that many digital scopes (and especially scopemeters) have.A few digital scopes have reasonable user interfaces (knobs). The pushbutton-only interfaces on scopemeters drives me crazy.
Tim.
Good advice. For a budget of $300 you can buy a very decent second hand scope probably with cursors as well. Scopemeters are usually very difficult to use as a bench instrument (too many options for too few buttons).
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Despite our shared hatred of the user interface, there are some things that scopemeters are really good at that analog scopes don't do well at all. Using them as data loggers to monitor min/max voltages over a glacial (by analog scope standard) timeframe (minutes, hours, days) is an example. This is really more of a "chart recorder" mode than a "oscilliscope" mode. On some of the fluke scopemeters the triggering is flexible enough that they can serve as impromptu protocol analyzers, looking for a glitch in a communication channel.
Tim.
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