what an oscilloscope recommended for a woman passionate about electronics?

[tggzzz]

That's the way to do it!

Taking a leap is best done when you understand where you are going, and that all intermediate steps can be jumped over. That is only possible after you have experience, or with boring things.

One skill you might like to cultivate is to learn how to twiddle things and see what happens The most exciting words in science isn't "eureka" but "that's funny".

certainly, but to make the jumps you need to have experience in the sector, I still lack it 

You have it backwards. You get experience by making jumps out of your comfort zone. You are doing that, but perhaps you need a little encouragement to continue.

Old skiing saying: if you aren't falling down 10 times a day, you aren't trying hard enough.

[rstofer]

The circuit goes all the way back to that link I provided a couple of posts back
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/starter-scope/50/  Starting at Reply 52
Basically, there are just two components: a 10k resistor and a 0.1 ufd capacitor.  I do 4 experiments in that thread starting at Reply 52

thanks, as soon as i have time i try to run these circuits, let's see if i will understand something 

Those experiments were based on the Analog Discovery 2 and were intended to show where the AD2 could do things that an ordinary scope can't. 

You can do the Forced Response experiment, we have been talking about this just above. 

The Bode' Plot is possible on some versions of the Siglent scope but only if you have a Siglent AWG to link to the scope.

The Phase Shift experiment is based on a differential measurement across the resistor.  Even if the Siglent could do an A-B across the resistor, there wouldn't' be a 3rd channel to measure the capacitor voltage.  There may be some other way to get this result but it's the result that is worth understanding.

The Impedance experiment is based on a particular adapter for the AD2 and a sweeping AWG linked to the scope.

When I posted those experiments, I was in the mode of 'selling' the AD2.  It's no secret that I think highly of the gadget.  One contributor elevated me to "Team Coach for AD2" (in jest,of course) because I won't quit talking about it.  I just don't talk about it when the topic is troubleshooting random pieces of electronics.  It would be inappropriate for vacuum tube radios (I think) but it would work great for Arduino projects at low voltages.  Yes, 100x probes are also a possibility, as are 10x (fixed) which I have purchased.

The AD2 was intended for 'learning' electronics and it can do things that would otherwise require an entire bench full of test equipment.  But it has its limitations and voltage is one of them.  It also doesn't have very high frequency response.  It's best used for 'learning' and that's what those 4 experiments were about.

[rstofer]

For people interested in AD/AD2, beware the input CMRR is horrible when sensitivity is below 500mV/div at 1x. Internally, the device has only 2 analog ranges, and 500mV/div is where the mux switches. Probably due to gain resistor mismatch (and they cheaped out on a fully differential amplifier), the high gain mode has much worse CMRR than the low gain mode.

I just this very moment ran into that (again!).  The AD2 won't really replace lab quality devices but when you consider the number of devices it emulates, you can get past the minor problems.

[CharlotteSwiss]

You have it backwards. You get experience by making jumps out of your comfort zone. You are doing that, but perhaps you need a little encouragement to continue.

Old skiing saying: if you aren't falling down 10 times a day, you aren't trying hard enough.

I will try to do my best 

The circuit goes all the way back to that link I provided a couple of posts back
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/testgear/starter-scope/50/  Starting at Reply 52
Basically, there are just two components: a 10k resistor and a 0.1 ufd capacitor.  I do 4 experiments in that thread starting at Reply 52

thanks, as soon as i have time i try to run these circuits, let's see if i will understand something 

Those experiments were based on the Analog Discovery 2 and were intended to show where the AD2 could do things that an ordinary scope can't. 
You can do the Forced Response experiment, we have been talking about this just above. 
The Bode' Plot is possible on some versions of the Siglent scope but only if you have a Siglent AWG to link to the scope.

ok understood now, I went to see what this AD2 was, before I did not understand
 

[CharlotteSwiss]

the siglent made a bad joke to me: I was playing with the internal probe compensation wave to learn the commands on the display. After 3-4 minutes from the start it turned itself off; reboot and turn off again. I had to disconnect the probe from the 1khz compensation socket in order to restart the siglent.
(it is as if it went into protection). I then tried again to measure the compensation signal and ok it doesn't turn off anymore.
Who knows what problem it detected (I exclude anomalous contacts between tip and ground!)
 

[rstofer]

Is there any possibility you started a Self Calibration?
That process must be done with the probes unplugged.  It might not be happy to see a signal on a channel.

[CharlotteSwiss]

Is there any possibility you started a Self Calibration?
That process must be done with the probes unplugged.  It might not be happy to see a signal on a channel.

yes I pressed Auto-setup, but to visualize the calibration square wave on the display. Then I simply acted on the timing knob to see the square wave well .. and the zag went out. (the probe was connected to the internal calibration 3v- 1khz socket)
I don't think I did something wrong ...
 

[StillTrying]

"After 3-4 minutes from the start it turned itself off; reboot and turn off again."

Check both ends of the mains cable are pushed well in, it shouldn't do that!

[CharlotteSwiss]

"After 3-4 minutes from the start it turned itself off; reboot and turn off again."

Check both ends of the mains cable are pushed well in, it shouldn't do that!

if you mean the power cable, it was correctly inserted in the power strip 

[Mortymore]

Other languages do too. I'm not sure from which part of Swiss Charlotte is from but the German, French and Italian translations are Kondensator, condensateur and condensatore respectively. A lot if not most of Europe uses a word related to condenser.

Yes. My Turkish friend calls them condensator and transformers transformator.

Português - Portugal: condensador
Português - Brasil: capacitor

[CharlotteSwiss]

slowly I am studying the oscilloscope, I started to understand various things such as Roll mode (signal that enters from right to left, without trigger).
However, I wanted to know if I understood how signal acquisition and visualization on the display work (in the classic trigger mode): for example, if you set a sec / div of 500ms, the total time of the display (14div) will be 7 seconds. Now if I start measuring a signal, it takes 7 seconds of acquisition / sampling before seeing the signal on the display.
But then I would like to know, what I see on the display are 7 seconds of signal, and will it update every 7 seconds?
 
thanks 

[CharlotteSwiss]

But then I would like to know, what I see on the display are 7 seconds of signal, and will it update every 7 seconds?

Scopes have a fast mode and a slow mode, depending on time base settings.

In slow mode, the scope acquires the required signal, renders it, and displays it. So in your 7 sec case, yes, you will get a refresh every 7 secs.

In fast mode where your eye can't really see every frame, the scope will render every captured frames internally, and combine them to one final frame to display. This is sometimes called a digital phosphor scope, or DPO.

It is called a DPO because it mimics the behavior of a phosphor based CRT scope. Phosphors have after glowing, and the more time it gets shined by electron beam, the higher the average intensity, and the less time it get shined by electron beam, the less the intensity it is. So more frequent waveforms are brighter, less frequent waveforms are duller.

The difference is, on a CRO, if a waveform is only scanned at a very low frequency (once in a few seconds, let's day), the brightness is too low to see, so you will miss critical erroneous details that you are looking for. In a DPO, intensity vs probability can be non-linear, so the scope can effectively high light less frequent waveforms so that you can see it.

For instance, if a scope can do 500k waveforms per second, and time base is short enough to allow that amount of frames to be acquired, then the scope will sample all of those frames, and composite them together with more frequent dots having more intensity, less frequent dots having lower intensity, and that's why you see on modern scopes you have a solid trace with "noise" and blurred trace surround it.

thanks for the explanation: I made the example of slow times (500ms div), to understand each other better, but of course it also happens with fast times, for example if you set sec / div at 1ms, the display signal will be of 14ms, and subsequently at 14ms frequency the signal will be renewed on the display.
Initially I thought that the signal that had already occurred would go to the left of the display .. and then moving with position I could go have it, instead what I can see is only the signal segment that occupies the time space of the display (14 div)
 

[Flump]

Hello Charlotte and everyone else.

I found myself in pretty much the same situation as Charlotte and was considering the scopes on her short list but could not make up my mind
which to go for but after reading this thread front to back 4 or 5 times I ordered the Siglent SDS1202X-E from Telonic today which should be with me tomorrow.
I had an old crt scope before but never did much with it so I am kind of starting from scratch and looking forward learning all about it.

So thank you Charlotte and everyone else that have contributed to this thread it was really helpful   

[CharlotteSwiss]

Hello Charlotte and everyone else.

I found myself in pretty much the same situation as Charlotte and was considering the scopes on her short list but could not make up my mind
which to go for but after reading this thread front to back 4 or 5 times I ordered the Siglent SDS1202X-E from Telonic today which should be with me tomorrow.
I had an old crt scope before but never did much with it so I am kind of starting from scratch and looking forward learning all about it.

So thank you Charlotte and everyone else that have contributed to this thread it was really helpful   

thanks to you for reading it and I'm glad that it served something. If you want to tell something about your new siglent, you can also do it on this topic of mine without problems, maybe we will compare (for example if you have problems with the usb stick every now and then. ecc ecc)

 I have just started going beyond the basic settings and I have to say that these DSOs do things ...
 

[tautech]

Charlotte
These DSO's have 2 types of Roll mode.

Auto Roll when the timebase is slowed to 50ms/div.
Dedicated Roll mode when the Roll button is pressed.

In dedicated Roll mode the trace appears immediately without a wait for the display buffer to full.

Try them both, they are each quite different.

[alsetalokin4017]

But then I would like to know, what I see on the display are 7 seconds of signal, and will it update every 7 seconds?

Scopes have a fast mode and a slow mode, depending on time base settings.

In slow mode, the scope acquires the required signal, renders it, and displays it. So in your 7 sec case, yes, you will get a refresh every 7 secs.

In fast mode where your eye can't really see every frame, the scope will render every captured frames internally, and combine them to one final frame to display. This is sometimes called a digital phosphor scope, or DPO.

It is called a DPO because it mimics the behavior of a phosphor based CRT scope. Phosphors have after glowing, and the more time it gets shined by electron beam, the higher the average intensity, and the less time it get shined by electron beam, the less the intensity it is. So more frequent waveforms are brighter, less frequent waveforms are duller.

The difference is, on a CRO, if a waveform is only scanned at a very low frequency (once in a few seconds, let's day), the brightness is too low to see, so you will miss critical erroneous details that you are looking for. In a DPO, intensity vs probability can be non-linear, so the scope can effectively high light less frequent waveforms so that you can see it.

For instance, if a scope can do 500k waveforms per second, and time base is short enough to allow that amount of frames to be acquired, then the scope will sample all of those frames, and composite them together with more frequent dots having more intensity, less frequent dots having lower intensity, and that's why you see on modern scopes you have a solid trace with "noise" and blurred trace surround it.

thanks for the explanation: I made the example of slow times (500ms div), to understand each other better, but of course it also happens with fast times, for example if you set sec / div at 1ms, the display signal will be of 14ms, and subsequently at 14ms frequency the signal will be renewed on the display.
Initially I thought that the signal that had already occurred would go to the left of the display .. and then moving with position I could go have it, instead what I can see is only the signal segment that occupies the time space of the display (14 div)
 

I think this should be a function of memory depth selected. For example on the Rigol there is a bar at the top of the screen display that shows the relationship between the screen display (in my case 12 units of the timebase setting) and the memory buffer which can be much larger (longer in time). If the screen display is only a portion of the memory buffer contents, then you can scroll off the screen to see events long before or long after the trigger event, which by default is in the center of the automatically displayed portion of the memory buffer. Also if the scope is stopped and you now zoom in the timebase to a faster sec/div setting, you are now looking at the same amount of signal data but at higher horizontal magnification, so some of it will be off the screen in both directions and you should be able to scroll there with the horizontal position control.

[Flump]

My SDS1202x-E came today and I feel like a complete newbie because it has so much stuff my old crt's didn't have and half of it I have no idea what it is haha
I have a long journey ahead of me.

Anyway here is a couple of pics of it measuring a 10Mhz OCXO

[CharlotteSwiss]

Charlotte
These DSO's have 2 types of Roll mode.

Auto Roll when the timebase is slowed to 50ms/div.
Dedicated Roll mode when the Roll button is pressed.

In dedicated Roll mode the trace appears immediately without a wait for the display buffer to full.

Try them both, they are each quite different.

the day after tomorrow when I get home I try to see these two ways of Roll, thanks 

I think this should be a function of memory depth selected. For example on the Rigol there is a bar at the top of the screen display that shows the relationship between the screen display (in my case 12 units of the timebase setting) and the memory buffer which can be much larger (longer in time). If the screen display is only a portion of the memory buffer contents, then you can scroll off the screen to see events long before or long after the trigger event, which by default is in the center of the automatically displayed portion of the memory buffer. Also if the scope is stopped and you now zoom in the timebase to a faster sec/div setting, you are now looking at the same amount of signal data but at higher horizontal magnification, so some of it will be off the screen in both directions and you should be able to scroll there with the horizontal position control.

the day after tomorrow I will look better, I have seen that the memory in the upper right changes when I adjust some parameters ... if I stop the signal and decrease the times, yes, of course I can also scroll beyond the limits of the display, but the total of the signal will be long the time of the original sum of the div 

My SDS1202x-E came today and I feel like a complete newbie because it has so much stuff my old crt's didn't have and half of it I have no idea what it is haha
I have a long journey ahead of me.
Anyway here is a couple of pics of it measuring a 10Mhz OCXO

very well, I have not yet come to study to have all those parameters on the display, but I will get there. 

[StillTrying]

pics of it measuring a 10Mhz OCXO

It looks like you've got the probe on X1, which would have a lot less than 10MHz of BW, scope and probe on X10 would be a lot better!

[tautech]

My SDS1202x-E came today and I feel like a complete newbie because it has so much stuff my old crt's didn't have and half of it I have no idea what it is haha
I have a long journey ahead of me.

Anyway here is a couple of pics of it measuring a 10Mhz OCXO

As Stilltrying points out you have your probe set to 10x but not the channel input attenuation hence the amplitude measurements are wrong. We can clearly see this as the channel tab still displays 1x.



Yes there is a lot of additional functionality in these X-E's over a CRO but as you already have that scope experience you'll be have it sorted fairly soon.
Triggering in a DSO is much more powerful than a CRO so it's a facet of DSO use that you need to master so to be able to achieve stable triggering on any waveform. This is a challenging and fun experience that will serve you well in all future DSO work.

And BTW, saving screenshots to USB sticks is accomplished almost instantly using the blue Print button.
Enjoy your new X-E. 

[Flump]

It's strange that one of the features/buttons you would use most which is "default" resets the probe scale to x1 , I would have thought
that if you use x10 all the time that would be the default setting.

But that's a good lesson learned for me to make sure its on x10 all the time so thank you  both

Here is another screen capture this time probe scale set to x10
It's a shame that the blue print button saves the the screen capture as png format and not jpg
I will have a look through the manual to see if that is an option to be changed.

[tautech]

It's strange that one of the features/buttons you would use most which is "default" resets the probe scale to x1 , I would have thought
that if you use x10 all the time that would be the default setting.

But that's a good lesson learned for me to make sure its on x10 all the time so thank you  both

Your preferred Default can indeed be saved and the feature to do so is in the Save/Recal menu as Default Key.
I strongly recommend you use factory Default first then set the scope just as you want a Default to be and then Save the User Default.

It's a shame that the blue print button saves the the screen capture as png format and not jpg
I will have a look through the manual to see if that is an option to be changed.

Shame NO, PNG files are so much smaller however you can select other file Save types in the Save/Recall menu.

At one time all Siglent scopes by default saved as JPG and we were much relieved after a period of lobbying when Siglent allowed for PNG file types.
Typically when we upload files onto the forum the much smaller PNG offers the benefit of faster page loads something I hated when we had a slow connection to the 'net.
Now with faster internet I don't give a damn however others that still have slow connections benefit from the smaller images.

[Per Hansson]

At one time all Siglent scopes by default saved as JPG and we were much relieved after a period of lobbying when Siglent allowed for PNG file types.
Typically when we upload files onto the forum the much smaller PNG offers the benefit of faster page loads something I hated when we had a slow connection to the 'net.
Now with faster internet I don't give a damn however others that still have slow connections benefit from the smaller images.

That is not the main point, PNG is lossless JPG is not.
A PNG will always be the best choice for screenshots because there is no degradation.
I hate when people use JPG for screenshots, it shows a lack of care to me.

EDIT: Attahed find a 7KB PNG, then a 45KB JPG (93% quality ratio) and finally a 7KB JPG (10% quality ratio)
P.S: How is this thread 20 pages long lol!?

[StillTrying]

Most scope shots can be squeezed into a 4-bit 16 colour png.

[CharlotteSwiss]

Charlotte
These DSO's have 2 types of Roll mode.

Auto Roll when the timebase is slowed to 50ms/div.
Dedicated Roll mode when the Roll button is pressed.

In dedicated Roll mode the trace appears immediately without a wait for the display buffer to full.

Try them both, they are each quite different.

dedicated roll the signal enters from the right and reaches the left.
Without roll button, with slower times of 50ms the signal does not travel on the display .. why do we have to call this second mode roll?
 

I think this should be a function of memory depth selected. For example on the Rigol there is a bar at the top of the screen display that shows the relationship between the screen display (in my case 12 units of the timebase setting) and the memory buffer which can be much larger (longer in time). If the screen display is only a portion of the memory buffer contents, then you can scroll off the screen to see events long before or long after the trigger event, which by default is in the center of the automatically displayed portion of the memory buffer. Also if the scope is stopped and you now zoom in the timebase to a faster sec/div setting, you are now looking at the same amount of signal data but at higher horizontal magnification, so some of it will be off the screen in both directions and you should be able to scroll there with the horizontal position control.

ok, if I stop, and then zoom in with the time base, I will obviously have the signal even beyond the horizontal margins of the display.
I did not understand the first part of your speech well: yes even in the siglent at the top right I have a parameter related to memory, which changes automatically, but I don't understand why I should have the signal also out of the display (I mean without changing the time base)
 

It's strange that one of the features/buttons you would use most which is "default" resets the probe scale to x1 , I would have thought
that if you use x10 all the time that would be the default setting.

I also thought the same thing, it was better that with default you set 10x (but it is customizable the default seems to me)

P.S: How is this thread 20 pages long lol!?

this forum is frequented by kind knights who helped me