Yes, they are.
You could try to trigger on edge in you burst. If you set the timebase to a bit more of a UI and move the trigger point off the screen you can get some form of eye diagram. In fact, that's how it used to be done long time ago.
With that you can estimate how "wide" your 0/1 transitions in your eye diagram is (usually done using cursors)
A step up form this very crude method is to measure the frequency at the 0/1 transition level, track the frequency over time, build a histogram and measure histogram range and/or standard deviation. You can perform a Fourier transform of the frequency track and get information on the spectral content of your frequency (this would be called frequency jitter BTW, you can get period jitter by measuring the period, cycle-to-cycle jitter by measuring the change in period, half-period jitter, TIE and tons of other types of jitter measurements).
A step up from there is to do statistical analysis on the the jitter, i.e. to determine what component of the jitter is bounded {correlated|uncorrelated} and what part is unbounded (aka. usually assumed to be Gaussian).
You don't need a super high-end scope for that, all you need is to acquire a long acquisition do a bit of math and you are done.
Chris
Ok lets take a specific example. SPDIF. It’s a single wire unidrectional digital data stream. No separate clock line or handshake. It just relentlessly keeps clocking the data out at the rate of the transmitter’s clock. And it is the transmitter’s clock’s quality (frequency stability/accuracy, jitter. wander) that I would like to measure using this stream. Is that what eye patterns are used for as well ? If so how do I go about doing that ?
The SPDIF format does have a repeating bit pattern in it but I don’t suppose any of those $400 scopes(Owon, Instek..) have pattern triggering do they ?