Found a weird one. Spot what’s weird about this philips scope:
Prize is a picture of a gerbil.
Yeah, that's no Philips, that's a rebadge job.
Well, the auction site lists it as "2 canal scope" but other than that I have no clue. ![Confused :-//](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/confused0024.gif.pagespeed.ce.5xOqKkq0Co.gif)
I've never even seen a Philips scope in the flesh.
I ended up with two. One was a writeoff from work and it's the analog scope I use the most at home. It's an interesting machine because it's actually a floating scope. The manual goes to some lengths to explain how the power supply is fully isolated, double insulated, and floating on the output side or fed by a DC source (i.e. run off an external battery) so the whole scope floats with a stern warning that the chassis is live with whatever voltage you apply to the BNC shields. It's the only scope I have where you don't get any continuity if you ohm from the BNC connector shields to the ground prong on the plug. Anyways, for that reason, this is a very useful scope to have around. I've never done it, I don't know why people feel compelled to do it, but with this one, I could scope a wall socket without blowing anything up.
The other Philips, I bought from a friend at work who got it but never really used it. I got this strange phone call from him one night asking if you can hook scopes up to stereo amplifiers. I said yes, that's what scopes are made for...what's going on...turns out his brother blew up an amplifier pretty badly. Anyways, the guy at work decided to list it on Kijiji after trying to probe the amplifier and realized he had a steep learning curve in front of him. I ended up buying it from him for what he paid for it. I've never done this since the other one is a purpose built floating scope so that takes care of my need for that but out of curiosity, I should ohm the BNC shields to the ground prong on the power cord on this one too and see if it's build the same way with the double insulated isolated power supply and floats or if it's a regular grounded chassis scope the way most of them are.
I don't know Philips' scope line well so I can't say how common the AC powered floating design was in their product line but as I said, that one is useful to have on hand knowing that the probe ground won't pull whatever you connect it to down to earth ground. The inputs aren't isolated though so that does leave the one gotcha that the probe grounds are all common so you're measuring from one reference and that's reference is shared, but it's not earth ground unless you connect it to earth ground.