Oscilloscope for Electronics Repair

[vaughnburrows]

Hi, What Oscilloscope do you reccomend for electronics repair?

[robrenz]

Give a little more information on what range/type of electronics things you may be repairing. Your question is a little vague to get a quality answer. 

[vaughnburrows]

Repairing LCD Tv's & Monitors,  DVD players,  CD Players.

[robrenz]

I should of asked this in my last post, what is your budget?
(I am really just stalling hoping some members more experienced than me give you that quality answer)
But my 2 cents would be a 100 MHz Rigol now or if you can spend more wait for the new 2000 series Rigol.

[vaughnburrows]

Budget $900, thanks for the reply.

[vaughnburrows]

Any idea when the Rigol 2000 series will be available?

[robrenz]

Any idea when the Rigol 2000 series will be available?

According to this thread https://www.eevblog.com/forum/product-reviews-photos-and-discussion/rigol-ds1000e-gt-ds2000/msg95741/#msg95741  June and below $1000. for 100MHz

[Psi]

Budget $900, thanks for the reply.

more than enough for a current Rigol, not quite enough for an Agilent.

[alm]

Why would you need more than say 20 MHz of bandwidth and some basic features for repair? All the high-frequency stuff is in dedicated ICs anyway, the main thing a scope is useful for in my opinion is power supplies (which probably represent the far majority of the repairs). So when buying new, the cheapest scope that doesn't suck (probably Rigol DS1052E) would probably be my choice.

[T4P]

Atten ADS1102CAL ( once new firmware comes out , this scope is all good )
Rigol DS1052E
All goes well .

[vaughnburrows]

Thanks Guys.

[vk6zgo]

Buy an old Tektronix or similar analog 'scope.
It will do most of what you need,while you get settled in to the repair business.
In the meantime,look around for the best deal on a Rigol or similar,so you will have both.
I bet you will end up using the analog most of the time

[vaughnburrows]

Buy an old Tektronix or similar analog 'scope.
It will do most of what you need,while you get settled in to the repair business.
In the meantime,look around for the best deal on a Rigol or similar,so you will have both.
I bet you will end up using the analog most of the time

thanks

[marmad]

Vaughn - the DSO choices aren't just low-end Rigol or higher-end Agilent.  If you're willing to spend a little more money than the Rigol DS1052E costs, consider a mid-range, respected DSO ($500 - $600) with a bigger screen and resolution - either something like the Owon SDS7102V (8" 800x600) or the Hantek DSO5102B (7" 800x480 screen).

Once I started using a DSO with >380k pixels of resolution, I couldn't imagine going back to the Rigol (Atten, etc) tiny screen again - it's like running a version of Windows 3.1 on a modern computer.

[sonicj]

the battery option for the Owon SDS7102V makes it very attractive for electronics repair.  if you need isolation for looking at mains powered equipment, simply unplug the scope.
-sj

[Bored@Work]

the battery option for the Owon SDS7102V makes it very attractive for electronics repair.  if you need isolation for looking at mains powered equipment, simply unplug the scope.
-sj

No. It has blank metal parts, all connected together, on the front. The BNC sockets. Even if you unplug it, and then stick the probe into mains powered equipment, you have a 50% chance of ending up with the live phase on the outer side of the BNC. Good luck turning some knobs or attaching/removing some probe or cable and accidentally touching the BNC sockets.

[vk6zgo]

Being able to hang across AC mains (between Active & Neutral) is a much overrated facility.
Most times you only want to make sure the mains are there,so you can hang your probe between Active & EARTH,which will give you a good idea of the waveform.
OK,the niceties of  high frequency stuff may be lost,but it's satisfactory most of the time

[w2aew]

Note that an inexpensive used analog scope will almost always do a better job of looking at the envelope of an RF or IF signal than most of the DSOs out there (unless you take care to play with memory depth and sample rate to avoid aliasing) - that's a common enough thing in radio/TV repair to make it a consideration.

[Wim_L]

Not sure how often normal consumer electronics still get repaired, except perhaps for rather high end devices... As seen in e.g. Dave's video about his defective LCD TV, many have features that will make repairs extremely difficult even if you can locate the fault location. Power supply repairs would, of course, still be possible in most cases.

Now, if you need to work on mains with an oscilloscope, the battery option on scopes not explicitly designed to work on the mains is an idea that works (keeping in mind the ground of all BNC connectors is still connected), but as explained above it's just asking to get zapped. Not safe at all. In fact, many normal oscilloscopes designed to work on battery power will provide a grounding post that you need to connect to earth before working on live equipment.

There are two good ways to do it. One is to buy an oscilloscope specifically designed for such uses. They're not cheap, and usually lower performance than what you'd expect to get for the price. The other is to use a standard oscilloscope with differential probes rated for the voltages you want to measure. Such active differential probes may be about as expensive as a cheap scope, but the cheap scope+active probe combination is likely to still be cheaper than a scope with differential inputs. You can improvise it using two passive probes (with ground clips NOT connected to the device being tested) and subtracting the two channels, which are set to an identical scale, from each other. Good enough for viewing the main waveform, not so good for viewing subtle effects on the waveform (the scope input amplifiers and probes aren't all perfectly identical, especially as frequency gets higher).

[marmad]

There are two good ways to do it. One is to buy an oscilloscope specifically designed for such uses. They're not cheap, and usually lower performance than what you'd expect to get for the price. The other is to use a standard oscilloscope with differential probes rated for the voltages you want to measure. Such active differential probes may be about as expensive as a cheap scope, but the cheap scope+active probe combination is likely to still be cheaper than a scope with differential inputs. You can improvise it using two passive probes (with ground clips NOT connected to the device being tested) and subtracting the two channels, which are set to an identical scale, from each other. Good enough for viewing the main waveform, not so good for viewing subtle effects on the waveform (the scope input amplifiers and probes aren't all perfectly identical, especially as frequency gets higher).

You can still find the Tektronix 212/214/221 reasonably cheap on eBay (not all the time - you have to keep an eye open).  Sometimes you can find them VERY cheap because the seller doesn't realize that the scope won't work (appears dead) if the 10 Ni-Cd batteries won't hold a charge - and they have to be replaced by opening the scope and doing a bit of re-soldering with tagged batteries (quite easy to do).  The scope can run off of AC power - but to save space it uses the batteries as 'capacitors' for the power supply - thus not working if they won't hold a charge.  BTW, by simply changing (and it's easy) 1 to 4 inexpensive caps on the power supply, you can run the scope off of any AC voltage from 110 to 250 / 48 to 62 Hz.

The scopes are beautifully designed - rugged, tiny, very portable, and double-insulated so they are floatable to 600V.  Mine is still working well after 30 years - although I've had to replace the Ni-Cds a few times.  The only caveat is the bandwidth - the 212/214 are DC to 500kHz - and the 221 is DC to 5MHz.  But if it's a second scope used primarily for mains work (and other portable apps), that's not really a problem.  Full service and calibration manuals are readily available for free online.

http://www.teknetelectronics.com/DataSheet/TEKTRONIX/TEKTR_21484822.pdf

Edit: BTW, it's impossible to tell from the photo on the datasheet, but this scope is smaller than any cheap DSO. For comparison, it's about half the cubic centimeters of a Rigol DS1052E - a beautiful piece of engineering.