that_guy_who_reviews

31 de marzo de 2014

Quality is better than what you would expect for the price!

It's a digital oscilloscope, which has its pros and cons, but for my purposes, it's an awesome deal! Way cheaper than your top of the line models, which can get up in the thousands of dollars. Unless you need super high precision, this will do just fine. It's a little noisy (as in signal noise, not loud noises. In that regard, it's dead silent), but as I said, for my purposes, the little noise is still more than enough to be able to look at it and see what's going on. Also, it comes with a USB cable, and the software to install it on a Windows box, so you can capture data from it. Although, I'm still having trouble figuring out how to use the software, and the software wouldn't install on Windows 7 from the CD that came with it, I had to download the software from their website, but it works now, so it's whatever. I just wish their help files were a little more helpful on how to use the software that came with it, but for this price, I still find it hard to complain. If you want the good stuff, be prepared to pay up to 10x the price of this.Ver más

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Jon E Watte

16 de abril de 2013

If the choice is no bench oscilloscope, or this oscilloscope, go for this!

I do electronics and robotics as a hobby -- anything from small mini-Sumo bots to walking airsoft-shooting quadrupeds. I largely design the bots myself, and build my own electronics boards from parts. Yet, I hadn't quite convinced myself to get an oscilloscope -- even a bottom of the line model is over three hundred, and I have a hundred-dollar 8-channel USB logic analyzer from Saleae that lets me analyze the mostly digital signals I'll see between microcontrollers and sensors. I've used scopes before at workshops and in former lines of work, so I know what they can do and what they're good for.A compbination of a problem I suspect is analog power related, and the very affordable cost of this scope, finally pushed me to pull the trigger, and I've been using this scope for a little bit now. It's such a step up from no scope at all! Also, being able to constantly see the inputs while I'm developing code on my computer is a boon; the dedicated display and control surface is highly productivity boosting compared to USB-based scopes (the cheap ones of which are all generally awful.)On the good news, this is a Prime item, so fast shipping, and if there's a problem, I know Amazon will stand behind it. Also, my scope arrived with the display flush against the front bezel; none of the broken display mount problems I read about in the other reviews. (But honestly, for the price, if I had had that problem, I might just have taken a glue gun to the bezel rather than going through the hassle of returning the item.)The buttons all work exactly like I want them to, and the math and trigger options are basic and get the job done for my range of signals (Arduino-level microelectronics; hobby robot-level power.) In fact, I prefer the behavior of the "Single" and "Normal" trigger modes of this scope to that of a Rigol DS1052 I've used at the workshop.There's a large empty compartment in the back of the scope where you can fit an Owon-special 7.4V LiPo battery if you want to take it on the go. I don't think I will, and if I do, I'll probably take one of the LiPo batteries I have laying around, and adapt it to the D-cell-style battery contacts in this compartment.So, why four stars and not five? Mainly, the analog input circuitry is quite borderline for a measurement instrument. While it's billed as an 8-bit input, the last bit seems to be mostly noise. Even when shorting the probes to their own ground clips, there's one bit of noise in the input signal. This is true for both channels. 7 bits of precision and 25 MHz of bandwidth is enough to check "how bad are the spikes on this power bus," but not what I'd use to debug finer analog circuitry like audio, radio, or similar.Also, the probes have "compensation" trimmers for over/under-shoot compensation, but using the built-in 1 kHz 5V square wave reference, the adjustment appears to do nothing -- or maybe what it does is minute enough that it's hidden in the noise floor?All in all, though, if the choice is no oscilloscope, or this oscilloscope, then this oscilloscope is so much better than none at all -- or even one of those low-cost USB and hand-held pieces of crap. This scope may be low-end, but at least it seems to do what it should do just fine!Ver más

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T. Ritter

6 de julio de 2012

Good Scope for Electronics Experimenters

When my Tektronix 2215 blew up (literally), in the middle of a project, after only 3 decades of service, I needed a new scope, and now. A day of research, an Amazon prime overnight, and I had a new scope the next day.Moving from an analog scope to a digital one can be a bit jarring. Digital waveforms tend to have jaggies, both from digitizing the wave and the pixelated display, which really do not mean anything. Averaging is available to reduce digitization noise, at the expense of noticeably slower response (at audio scan rates). Visual noise is less with probes at x1, but that severely limits bandwidth, so, as usual, digital work probably would want x10. The bandwidth does not stop abruptly at 25MHz, but sampling is about 100M samples per second, so anything approaching 50MHz is going to be problematic in any case. That should have little impact for audio or video work.The usual 2 probe channels, with independently adjustable gain, and the usual triggered timebase adjustments are of course present. However, on an old analog scope almost every new feature meant a new knob or two. On a compute-based digital scope, buttons are entry points into an extensive menu system which controls features not immediately visible by looking at the front panel. It is necessary to traverse the menu system to see what is available.For example, the HORIZONTAL MENU button brings up a column of selections, one of which is Set Window. Selecting that by pushing F2 brings up vertical lines to define a window area, movable with the POSITION knob, and sizable with the SEC/DIV knob. Then selecting Zone Window with F3 expands and shows that subset area. This may be the closest thing to the second timebase (B delayed by A) in old scopes.As another example, the CURSOR button brings up a menu with Type (F1) which steps through "types" as (horizontal) Voltage cursors or (vertical) Time cursors or Off. By adjusting the Position controls, cursors can be moved to points on the waveform, as the scope gives voltage or time measurements for those positions.This is an excellent stand-alone machine. But one of my main desires was the ability to capture screen waveform graphics, for eventual use as a web file, as a sort of lab notebook. Doing that well on this machine is tricky. Although there is a USB connector on the back (USB 1.1 only, ugh), that is used to connect to a separate Windows computer, and does not support USB flash drives directly. One might expect the scope to at least work like a modern digital camera, with a removable SD memory card, but there is no such feature.The Windows computer program essentially acts as a remote control for many of the scope features. But it does not seem to access even the 4 waveforms which can be saved in the machine, so saving examples found in the lab means moving a computer into the lab. Moreover, the program can save a waveform image, but just the image, and not the accompanying voltage and timebase settings. So we get the displayed waveforms, but we have no way to understand what they meant at the time the data were captured. So settings have to be written down and transferred manually, which is not great.This bottom-of-the-line machine turns out to be an excellent choice for most work. It is relatively small, relatively portable, and quiet. Testing modern digital designs at full speed will need more bandwidth, but probably much more, beyond even the top of this line. Logic testing those same designs at lower speed may be an option in some cases.

Ken Rains

22 de agosto de 2013

Portable Digital Scope

In general I like this unit a lot. It is easy to use, has many desirable features including the FFT function. The size, weight and battery operation makes it ideal for field use in servicing professional recording and motion picture studios. The only thing I don't like are the digital artifacts arising from the sampling. I much prefer a good analog scope like my Tektronix scopes for their clean image. At this price this scope in a great deal.Ver más

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Robert A. Fowler Jr.

3 de julio de 2014

Three Stars

Good for a cheap scope. OK for hobbyist

John K. Shaffstall

11 de febrero de 2013

Broken On Arrival

Well, I took a chance and it didn't pay off this time. The units screen was broken right out of the box. The box showed no signs of damage so the sope had to be packaged in its broken state. Notified Owon twice with no reply. Not good. Granted, its a cheap scope but I expect to receive it in working order. My present opinion is to stay away from Owon products. They simply aren't worth taking the chance.UPDATE: It's been over a week since I notified Owon of the broken product I received. All I have gotten back are autoreplies saying they will get back to me ASAP. Which has not happened. These people have hundreds of dollars of my money and I have their broken scope. BEWARE OF OWON!!!!!Ver más

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