The oscilloscope I learned on was my father's Heathkit. A few years later I got his permission to use it.
Frank McKenney
--
My father ... drilled into me from an early age that if someone says
something is impossible, that just means it will take a bit longer
to achieve, and that the only failure in working with equipment is
if it fatally electrocutes you.
-- Seth Horowitz / The Universal Sense
Hi
For those beginners, who are neither afraid of CRTs nor spoiled by smartphone-style interfaces, a transistorized "equivalent" of this is still being built. Being cheap, it's even somewhat popular and various importers have it.
It's called an "ST16", sometimes also "ST16A", "-B" or "-C". It's an old design, introduced back in '82 by Xinjian Instrument & Equipment (not made by them anymore, nearest equivalent being the "XJ4210A").
The CRT is a simple low-voltage model (hundreds of volts, not kVs acceleration), similar to the CRTs used in various cheap 500 MHz spectrum analyzers, but smaller. The electronics are without any bells or whistles, single channel single trace + X-Y mode, 7-10 MHz. There is a "real" trigger circuit, not free-running like in the ancient Heathkit.
One of the few useful properties is the total absence of anything switchmode. There's a mains transformer and everything goes linear from there. That makes it useful when switching noise must be avoided for whatever reason. As Phil Hobbs the resident optoelectronics guru has once put it, "There is SMPS quiet and then there is quiet".
The ST16 was picked up by a number of other companies in the far east and is still built with slight variations, usually in the same upright form factor, though sometimes otherwise. The biggest difference now is the cheap build quality and the flimsy plastic case front (Xinjian's old ST16 of the 80ies and 90ies had a metal chassis and sturdy housing).
Depending on who makes it, the prices of the cheap plastic versions (no metal ones made anymore) are usually around 500 CNY (in the 100 US$ ballpark) in China, in the 150-200 $ or ? ballpark imported. They show up on ebay regularly, and also various resellers that specialize in cheap imported test equipment have them under various names.
That's about as low-end as scopes can go nowadays, if you don't consider those cheap abominations that are marketed as a "student oscilloscope". Those exist too, but having "banana" plugs, no real triggers, and input circuits with undefined or weird impedances they are really not useful except maybe as a cheap chassis with CRT, for putting your own circuits in, after having ditched the original contents.
Regards Dimitrij
I built an EICO from a kit and then a year or two later used the same unit in the electronics class in school. One of the students found that if you put a probe on the horizontal input and flipped the switch between the different horizontal selections a charged cap would be connected to the probe tip. He could take the voltage by pressing hard on the tip lowering his resistance I guess. So he would hand the probe to someone else and they got a nice little zap.
I think I paid $100 for my kit.
More recently I bought one of the low bandwidth Hantek attached scopes, but the software won't run and they have lousy support. I think there is some open source software to run on it which I may try.
-- Rick
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