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Velleman HPS40 scope ???

H

Harshana

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi all,

I'm thinking of buying this scope. Has anyone in this group bought
this? What do U all think of it?

I'm a hobbyist, working with simple analog ccts and ATMEL AVR
sereis uCs.

Had anyone had any problem working only with a single channel? I really

prefer to have two, but I can't go for a APS230 - too expensive

Anyone has any idea on other similar products less than $300?


http://www.velleman.be/common/productlist.aspx?lan=1&id=344545


Please comment,
Harshana
 
T

Tim Shoppa

Jan 1, 1970
0
At $300 for a handheld scope, it's not a bad deal It's
lower-performance than Fluke scopemeters etc, but it's a lot cheaper
too.

The lack of a second channel is a serious impediment to a lot of repair
and design work where differential timing is relevant. If you are
building PIC circuits from scratch and they aren't interfacing to many
real-world things then it's not so bad because you can write test code
that makes diagnostic waveforms that don't generally require two
traces. It's unclear from my reading of the HPS40 specs if it is one
analog channel with a separate connector for a trigger or just one
input used for both trigger and amplitude... in many cases having a
separate trigger input is as good as a second channel, in other cases
it's not enough, it depends on what you're doing.

In the US, used two-channel analog scopes are available from $5 (an old
beater good for seeing audio waveforms) to the low hundreds of $ (A Tek
465B, 2215, etc. good to 60 or 100 MHz, possibly with calibration). I
greatly prefer analog scopes myself, just my personal frustration with
the interfaces that many digital scopes (and especially scopemeters)
have.

A few digital scopes have reasonable user interfaces (knobs). The
pushbutton-only interfaces on scopemeters drives me crazy.

Tim.
 
N

Nico Coesel

Jan 1, 1970
0
Tim Shoppa said:
At $300 for a handheld scope, it's not a bad deal It's
lower-performance than Fluke scopemeters etc, but it's a lot cheaper
too.

The lack of a second channel is a serious impediment to a lot of repair
and design work where differential timing is relevant. If you are
building PIC circuits from scratch and they aren't interfacing to many
real-world things then it's not so bad because you can write test code
that makes diagnostic waveforms that don't generally require two
traces. It's unclear from my reading of the HPS40 specs if it is one
analog channel with a separate connector for a trigger or just one
input used for both trigger and amplitude... in many cases having a
separate trigger input is as good as a second channel, in other cases
it's not enough, it depends on what you're doing.

In the US, used two-channel analog scopes are available from $5 (an old
beater good for seeing audio waveforms) to the low hundreds of $ (A Tek
465B, 2215, etc. good to 60 or 100 MHz, possibly with calibration). I
greatly prefer analog scopes myself, just my personal frustration with
the interfaces that many digital scopes (and especially scopemeters)
have.

Good advice. For a budget of $300 you can buy a very decent second
hand scope probably with cursors as well. Scopemeters are usually very
difficult to use as a bench instrument (too many options for too few
buttons).
 
T

Tim Shoppa

Jan 1, 1970
0
Scopemeters are usually very
difficult to use as a bench instrument
(too many options for too few buttons).

Despite our shared hatred of the user interface, there are some things
that scopemeters are really good at that analog scopes don't do well at
all. Using them as data loggers to monitor min/max voltages over a
glacial (by analog scope standard) timeframe (minutes, hours, days) is
an example. This is really more of a "chart recorder" mode than a
"oscilliscope" mode. On some of the fluke scopemeters the triggering
is flexible enough that they can serve as impromptu protocol analyzers,
looking for a glitch in a communication channel.

Tim.
 
R

Rich Grise

Jan 1, 1970
0
Hi all,

I'm thinking of buying this scope. Has anyone in this group bought
this? What do U all think of it?

I'm a hobbyist, working with simple analog ccts and ATMEL AVR
sereis uCs.

Had anyone had any problem working only with a single channel? I really

prefer to have two, but I can't go for a APS230 - too expensive

Anyone has any idea on other similar products less than $300?

This URL is 308 chars long, so it'll be kind of dedious to unwrap,
but it's fairly specific bay search:

http://search.ebay.com/oscilloscope...nualQ20Q2dprobeQQsofocusZbsQQsorefinesearchZ1

Just FYI, I searched on "oscilloscope", subject only, exclude "manual"
and/or "probe", price $100-$300, ending up to 7 days from now.

Good Luck!
Rich
 
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