Happy Days are Here Again... new O'scope!
xanatos
Posts: 1,120
I've been limping along for 14 years now without a real scope... I could never really justify it and it didn't really impact my ability to design & build projects. But some of my recent labors bore some serious fruit, so it was time for a new scope! Below is my beautiful new Rigol DS1102E. Since this seemed to be the defacto scope choice among so many pro designers/engineers for their own workbenches, I just went with it. So far I absolutely love it. I'm used to using the old Tektronics scopes and without even glancing at the directions that came with this scope, I had it up, calibrated and measuring stuff in under 10 minutes. Great little scope. Operates just like I'd expect without all the clunky nonsense I had to put up with on my DS Nano. I also bought the tiny X-Protolab as a toy, it was just too cute to pass up 
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I've have my eye on a Rigol for a long time, but like you said, you have to wait for justification.
For the time being, my PropScope is just fine.
Good luck with it!
Jim
I love good scopes. Still wish I could afford one of the high-end spectrum analyzers that I used to use when I worked in Corporate America. 100kHz to 24 gHz - I used it for satellite acquisition on an 11 meter dish, but you could do an immense amount of fun stuff with it, including finding and demodulating all sorts of signals. HP made it... I still see them on eBay once in a while - for $5k+.... if I bought all the cool equipment I want - small nations don't have that much cash
Dave
Indeed. It's so nice to be able to actually look at clock signals, really SEE data going across a line... even freeze it and look at the bits! And even just to do quick rough voltage level checks at a rate you could never do with a regular multimeter... I missed all that!
My only disappointment was that there is no 50 Ohm input.
Other than that I love it.
Bean
Dave
They have some other interesting items as well... future wish list additions!
model (and with a 7" screen) and it does well. Only problem recently was one of the probes has started
to become intermittent, and the start-up time is a bit annoying. I think if I did a lot of small signal work
I would be affected by the noise floor though, which isn't great.
Trying to give me scope-envy?
It turned up this morning, and I've been playing with it. It's a bit overwhelming, but I managed to get a stable display of the probe calibration signal. I'll try it out on one or two of my development boards.
I'll probably sell my old Tek 2235 scope at the next local amateur radio club auction (I've just missed one that was held last Saturday). I bought it over 10 years ago and I think that it cost a lot more than the Rigol unit, especially when inflation is taken into account.
You wont appreciate my new DS2202a then
It's probably overkill for me but I was sold after watching the videos of the reviews on these. The screen is great, the protocol decode works very nicely for any one or two wire protocols and refresh rate is awesome. It runs circles around the old Hantek 50Mhz I had. The screen is just huge!
Rigol really give you a lot of scope for your money. Congrats on your new acquisition as well!