So yes I'm a beginner in the electronics world - well I've been playing for a couple of years now via Arduino etc which has led me here - largely through watching a lot of Dave's content. I'm probably about to ask a question that will have all you experts sighing ..
I have though developed specific interest areas and actively pursue robotics and remote control, I also dabble with telemetry and the collection of situational awareness data via the likes of bluetooth, WiFi, 2.4 Ghz and other frequencies but I need to get more serious, I need to be able to inspect and debug at a serial protocol level, I also want to be able to see what 'sensors' are really doing to determine whether they are the issue or my coding skills, I also want to be able to probe what a sensor is seeing vs what it is encoding, motor noise, RF interference, harmonics and wire borne interference from connected systems etc etc.
So I decided it is time to buy an oscilloscope, there are so many, most will fulfill 90% of my requirements but so few even discuss serial analytics and protocol decoding, I really don't want to spend hour upon hour tallying peaks and troughs and working out who is saying what - if I must then so be it but I'd rather not.
I'd like to be able to focus on specific devices on say an I2C or SPI interface, but also see if some device is talking out of turn or not handshaking properly to isolate timing issues / line capacitance etc etc. - aka an oscilloscope. As an example I have a very large helicopter, the RC receiver also transmits telemetry data back to the ground - but the RF interferes with the onboard flight controller quite badly - so somebody isn't shielded, I've confirmed that the RF noise is on the wires but not by anything other than trial and error.
To a noob like myself the sheer number of scopes available is daunting, many don't even discuss what I need and focus mostly on settings aimed at the electronics diagnosis world, to find out what they can and can't do you are faced with reading manual after manual to figure what they can really do. I see so many for sale and yet I'm then compelled to play hunt the manual to figure out if they can do what I need and it is usually negative, this is getting frustrating.
Right now the only one on my list is the Rigol 1054Z, can anyone suggest any others that cost hundreds as opposed to thousands, this is a hobby not a business for me I can't justify thousands on buying gear I use infrequently. I'd rather buy a high quality secondhand than a mediocre new if that makes any sense, the Tektronix DPO's don't seem to appear often (or at all at what I consider sensible money).