Advice on affordable USB oscilloscope

Honestly, I think the 200kHz sample rate is wayyyyyy toooo slow. ;-) I think that if you look around, you can find yourself a nice chinese DSO for about twice the money. Something like this maybe:

I just bought the DS1102C and I really like it. Believe me it blows that USB scope away with 400 million samples per second and a 1MB buffer depth. Plus it comes with a 3 year warranty.

Anthony Fremont ha scritto:

It's 445¤ (the version including 16channel Logic Analyzer) Anyway, seems a very good instruments. Thanks

The logic analyzer adds allot to the price at least on the model that I bought. It added 50% to the price, so I didn't get that option. These are fairly inexpensive, but I don't know anything about them:

Larger screen and battery options, lower sampling rate, but still miles ahead of the USB scope. I went with the Rigol because they make one of Agilent's low-end scopes and I liked the features.

Description says:

They sample it over multiple cycles and combine them. If the signal isn't repeating identically it doesn't work. "equivalent sample rate" is a BS spec; if I *had* a repeating signal I would be using the analog scope anyway. My advice is to ignore it and pay attention to the 400.

Exactly.

The first figure is for continuous sampling over a time period, & the second figure is for sampling with skewed timing offsets over multiple time periods. Eg; it might take 10 samples over one cycle at X+0%, then another 10 samples from the next cycle at X+5%, etc, resulting in finer detail, but with the risk of aliasing.