Hi
I’m looking to get some advice on selecting an oscilloscope. If you want to cut straight to the cheese, then you can skip my rambling in the next few paragraphs and go straight to the list of oscilloscopes I’m considering at the bottom of this post. Please give me your thoughts about which one you would prefer.
I’m planning to buy an oscilloscope from ebay.de. This is my first oscilloscope and I will probably mostly be working with audio / analog things. Although working with digital electronics in the future might be an option, but from what I read it’s best to have different devices for digital and analog, is that right? So at the moment I’m mostly looking for an analog oscilloscope, but I’we also heard about some oscilloscope that do both analog and digital but not quite sure if they are something worth looking at. I’m not even sure what it means exactly for an oscilloscope to be digital? Does it only mean that he does digital sampling?
Allot of people recommend Tektronix, but they seem to be rather expensive. I’we also been looking at Hameg and Philips. I’we even been thinking if I should just get a dirt cheap entry level 20Mhz oscilloscope just to begin with.
Regarding the probes, most of those oscilloscope don’t come with probes. I haven’t looked into the price of probes, but I’m wondering if they are a big factor of the price, and does the price I have to spend on probes differ much between oscilloscopes?
Stability and availability for support is a big factor for me since I live in Iceland, where not much local support is available. I’we heard that it can be hard and expensive to calibrate oscilloscopes. But the Philips 3380A oscilloscope is supposed to be autocalibrating (according to the ebay seller). Is ease of calibration something I should consider when buying a scope?
So far I’we found a few oscilloscope at www.ebay.de. Here are some examples
TEKTRONIX
This one is supposed to be really good, but might be an overkill for me.
This one is way cheaper, and older! I’we heard good things about this one, but it’s also said to have allot of internal noise. I’m not really sure though how much that would affect what I’m planning to do.
HAMEG
This one should go cheap. But I’we heard that people don’t recommend Hameg for professional audio work. But still it should be enought for me, I think?
Not so sure what the difference is between thisone and the Hameg 1005
PHILIPS
I haven’t heard much about these PHILIPS scopes, but some sources say they are good. Now the 30xx models are straight analog scopes, but the 33xx are combiscopes. Now I’m mainly familiar with analog electronics. And these combiscopes, if I understand correctly, can work both with analog devices, and serve as a digital storage oscilloscope (for working with digital electronics, right?). Would you recommend those combiscopes? Are there any drawbacks in having both these functions in one device? The Philips scopes that I’we been looking at are:
This one is purely analog
This one and the next one are combiscopes (analog and digital storage oscillscopes)
The ebay seller talks about auto calibration. Could be usefull since it’s hard to get oscilloscopes calibrated here in Iceland.
OTHER BRANDS
Now here are some scopes from some company’s I don’t know much about. But they seem to be cheap and might fit my needs. I’m not sure about how a memoryscope works though and if I can use it as an analog scope?
A cheap analog scope
A memoryscope.
Any suggestions recommended. I might add that I’m also open for other recommendations if you feel something else would suite me better.
Thanks!
Frímann Kjerúlf](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=230339562094&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.de%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38%26_nkw%3D230339562094%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1)](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=130301360411&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.de%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38%26_nkw%3D130301360411%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1)](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=300308892673&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.de%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38%26_nkw%3D300308892673%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1)](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=220402846713&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.de%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38%26_nkw%3D220402846713%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1)](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110382260361&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.de%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38%26_nkw%3D110382260361%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1)](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=270380875565&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.de%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38%26_nkw%3D270380875565%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1)](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=150342603239&ru=http%3A%2F%2Fshop.ebay.de%3A80%2F%3F_from%3DR40%26_trksid%3Dm38%26_nkw%3D150342603239%26_fvi%3D1&_rdc=1)](http://cgi.ebay.de/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=280335780538&_trksid=p2759.l1259)](http://cgi.ebay.de/Tektronix-2465B-400MHz-4Kanal-Analog_W0QQcmdZViewItemQQ_trkparmsZ72Q3a1229Q7c66Q3a2Q7c65Q3a12Q7c39Q3a1Q7c240Q3a1318Q7c301Q3a1Q7c293Q3a1Q7c294Q3a50QQ_trksidZp3286Q2ec0Q2em14QQhashZitem190303548840QQitemZ190303548840QQptZWissenschaftlicheQ5fGerQc3Qa4teQQsalenotsupported)