Much as I’d love to have a proper oscilloscope I’m wise enough to know that spending a couple of hundred quid on a cheapo version is probably a bad idea. This is a tool that warrants some significant investment. Or alternatively pretty much none.
I’ve just bought and built a little Jyetech DSO138 kit oscilloscope and whilst the specs are pretty pitiful, for £20 it’s a pretty good piece of kit.
The main features are as follows:
- Analog bandwidth: 0 – 200KHz
- Sampling rate: 1Msps max
- Sensitivity: 10mV/Div – 5V/Div
- Sensitivity error: <5%
- Vertical resolution: 12-bit
- Timebase: 10us/Div – 500s/Div
- Record length: 1024 points
- Built-in 1KHz/3.3V test signal
- Waveform frozen (HOLD) function available
- Save/recall waveform
So, this thing is not going to cut it for high performance professional applications but if you’re learning electronics and playing with RC circuits and 555 timers then it’ll definitely get the job done for you.
Building the kit requires just basic soldering techniques but some of the parts are quite small, and there’s a lot of them, so it’s not a kit for a first time soldering experiment. It also comes in two flavours, one with the surface mount components already done and one where you need to solder them yourself. Surface mount soldering is a challenge so avoid this version if you’ve never done it before.
While I could go into great detail about calibration and how well it responds and all that jazz, it frankly doesn’t matter. If you’re buying this kit, and you have any kind of common sense, you’re not looking for or expecting that level of sophistication. At the end of the day it lets you see reasonably robust, reasonably slow signals in reasonable situations. Job’s a good ‘un.
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