Yet another person asking for Oscilloscope recommendations

microcontrollers and repairing (and someday repurposing) old stuff.

equipment from my SO's home music studio and soon a pro studio.

stuff. Thing is I have many constrains that I'll explain.

it will be shipped to the USA and then re shipped from there, and shipping costs for weight and size both are pretty high, and I could end up paying more than $150 shipping on an old tektronix.

might be using like freq counting, and etc. Plus they're light and small.

really the ceiling of what I can afford.

I have experience with those things dropping the support off the edge of the Earth very quickly (I have a top2004 ic programmer which barely works today) plus I would love to be able to use a pc scope with open source software in Linux (one can dream).

get it to work for a lot longer than a brand less closed one, and plus its portable, and can we say field testing? The two drawbacks are, one the rarer probe connector. And two and most important, that it does 72msps, so almost 8mhz (even when some Chinese digital scope vendors insist 250msps is 100mhz), and I wonder as a hobbyist how quickly id hit that ceiling.

them), I think for microcontroller work my (simple, cheap, oss) LA should do the work, but I fear finding myself having to scope a chip out of my range.

NOW and for a long while. It would be "fun" to get and fix an old or new one but I need a working tool.

The sampling spec and input spec's are not exactly the same thing.

Normally you want 4 times sampling, so that 250msps sounds about right for that scope you're talking about.

In digital it takes at least 2 readings to capture a sine wave how ever, that will be a very bad results.. The software would actually need to create the sine wave from 2 points on the screen and it would mostly be inaccurate from the real one. So, using more points to capture data is the best thing to do.

At the lower sweep rates, the sampling is much higher than can be processed for viewing, there just isn't enough pixels to show and thus, most of them just skip over samples and use only the amount that can be processed as viewable data however, most of these scopes have fancy functions in them to make use of those other readings, they do not go unused. You have glitch mode, averaging mode etc.. which uses all the other samples to help form the data you do see to give you a more accurate account of what the samples you didn't see by blending them with those you do see or, making a sample stand out infront of the others that could be out of place, like in glitch mode. etc..

If you can get a 100 Mhz scope, most likely will sample 4 times that. one thing you may want to research on however, some of these scopes interleave their samples from 2 different channels. In other words, if you have 2 channels operating at the same time, taking readings, you may only get half the samples per second on each channel. The over all samples are still the same but they are being divided. If this bothers you, then look hard at the spec's to make sure the samples per second remain the same for both channels operating at the same time on each channel.

A digital scope is very good due to their abilities to host usb memory and connect to PC's. I don't think you need to worry a lot about interfacing to PC's. Just get one that is a stand alone but has the option of connecting to a PC. Most do, I really don't think you want one that is PC only, those are ok for LAB use if you are logging some work that needs scope functionality to diagnose it. It makes it easy to then move the files else where on the PC>

That's my take on it. I am sure others will tell you something, too.

Jamie