Debranded Micsig handheld scope on sale on eBay

[DiodomanX]

I will try it when arrived, they use DHL for shipping to México.

[TheAmmoniacal]

Finally got the PC software working, it was giving me:

The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log or use the command-line sxstrace.exe tool for more detail.

Installing the fix https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/confirmation.aspx?id=14431 fixed it (Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package ATL Security Update).

But then it popped up requiring a an authorization code for the software, what is this? How do I get it?

Is it possible to get a USB driver for this scope?

[elebot]

The USB driver is in the ScopeSuite installation package. But it is installed only on 32b Windows (as it is a 32b driver) and I believe it requires at least Windows 7.
Personally I have solved it by using virtual machine and one of the free IE test images from Microsoft (see https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-edge/tools/vms/). For me that worked just fine.

I think the authorization error/message is related to missing driver/not connected scope. Make sure the driver is installed and you can see your scope is in the device manager.
Good luck.

[DiodomanX]

Got mine, fix the keyboard and the red input and have the same issues with AC at high Freq. but at least is usable for quick measures.

[TheAmmoniacal]

Got mine, fix the keyboard and the red input and have the same issues with AC at high Freq. but at least is usable for quick measures.

What do you people mean with "AC at high frequency" problem? The specification of the DMM IC says 1 kHz max. Mine reads AC voltage just fine up to 1 kHz, but falls off the cliff at higher freq.

Anyone know how to use the screen capture on this scope? Does it only work when connected to the PC? Can it save it to a USB memory stick? (doesn't work with FAT32 or NTFS)

[DiodomanX]

Can be saved to USB memory stick, i only try FAT32, later i will test NTFS.

[TheAmmoniacal]

Can be saved to USB memory stick, i only try FAT32, later i will test NTFS.

Did it work for you? USB 2.0 or USB 3.0-3.1 stick?

[DiodomanX]

USB 2.0 8GB Sandisk

Enviado desde mi XT1563 mediante Tapatalk

[TheAmmoniacal]

That might be the problem then, I only have USB 3.x memory sticks here, none of them work. The "Screen capture" option is grey and inactive.

[blackfin76]

Do you like your Micsig handheld oscilloscopes? How is the waveform update? Fast as expected?

[blackfin76]

I also bought one of these, I did enable the multimeter function by restoring the keypad and connection to the socket.
I have identical issues as elebot.

- DC mV seems fine
- AC mV seems fine (even up to 100kHz)
- diode forward voltage indicates lower then on my other multimeter
- resistor test has large error in low resistor ranges, becomes smaller at larger resistance values
- capacitance test works but indicates large error. I measured a 1nF/1% devices and it indicates 0.95nF

About the scope:

It's think it's actually a nice scoop, menu's will have to get used at of course. I used a Tektronix AFG2021 AWG to generate signals and used a 50 Ohm terminator at the end of the coax. Vertical and horizontal scales are well within specs, automatic measurements like Up-p, Urms, frequency, rise and fall times come very close to those measured on my Agilent scoop and the settings on the AWG.

It has two acquisition modes, normal and fast. In normal mode it uses the entire memory, in fast mode it only uses so much as to fill the screen. Probably a fixed number of point, a similar function I have seen in Tektronix TDS3000 series. The number of waveforms displayed varies with horizontal setting, have not figured out the relation between number of waveform/s and horizontal setting.
This scope has no DPO like function, don't know if there are portable scoops out there that have this capability.

build quality is oke, the housing feels very solid and might takes some abuse, however I was suprised they used really poor quality screws to mount the display module. This model LCM is a 5.7" 640x480 panel, Data Image model FG 050720. They have good reliability but poor viewing angles and resistive pressure sensitive touchscreen. You have to look straight at it or from above, if you tilt the scoop backwards the image fades. If you look at the correct angle they give a very clear image.

The probes Micsigg supplied look like they are of of good quality, bit too large for my taste. I prefer Tektronix probes, much smaller size and nice flexable cable. Probably won't use them untill I run out of options.

I also spent a few minutes with a Siglent SHS806, but this product has much lower waveforms/s and a display with much lower resolution. So the Micsig really looked like a class higher compared to that.
The last portable scoop I used was a Tektronix THS720P, a very capable scoop imo, even though it's alomost 20 years in use, I think it can take a rest from now on.

Thinks I don't like? Yes of course. I don't think all the options are placed in the menu's in an intuitive way. Selecting the acquisition lenght is put under save/recall button, the acquisition mode under the scope menu and the refresh rate under the display menu. All funtions that are related to one another and could beter have been put in one menu.
Also I really dislike the scoop does not display it's actual sample rate on lower sweep times. The DC accuracy seems to have some issues. It needs constant calibration in the lowest settings of a divider range. Range 1 seems to go from 2mV to 50mV, range 2 from 100mV to 2V and range 3 from 5V to 20V/div. In the 2 lowest settings of range 1 and 2 you get quite a large DC offset which can be made zero by calibration. However this error keeps coming back after some time. In the 100mV/div setting this error is about 50mV!!! DC drift in this order I have not seen before in a DSO. Also the acquisition memory depth is 240k points, this half when 2 channels are being used, also the sample rate halfs when both channels are used. The internal ADC is a 8-bit two channel 500Ms/s device, so I wonder if Micsig just added those two numbers up or are they actually interleaving them on one channel 

[afm]

But you are happy with your oscilloscope, right? I bought one and has the same problems as you, but I'm happy with it

Before I had bought the Hantek DSO 1062B, after three weeks stopped working, I sent back to China and the seller never returned to me. I open a dispute in  PayPal and received the money back
The Hantek DSO 1062B comes with indoor fan, and heat a lot, a piece of trash!

This Micsig is 10 times better

[blackfin76]

Yes, still happy. The longer you work with your equipment the more things you start to notice. Three other things I noticed about the Micsig:

- FFT has linear scale, I don't get to see an option to put it into logarithmic.
- When you attach probes and select the lowest vertical scale, the artifacts of a switching regulater start to appear. This was noticeable with the PSU connected.
- When measuring the output of a 44MHz clock oscillator I noticed the  signal did not stable trigger, again this was done with the supplied probes. It looked like the signal was jittering, which it wasn't (verified with other scope). This problem becomes worse when enabling channel two, because of the interleaving it will take even less sample points. I believe this caused by the way the proces the signal for visual presentation. When I have some time I will repeat the test in dot mode instead of vector mode.

One thing I still didn't test is battery run time, of course this has to be tested because it's portable.

Edit: did a run time test, both channels on, backlight at 50% brightness. Run time from full to low battery indicator was 4 hours. At that moment I reconnected the power supply to recharge the batteries. The battery is a 7.2V 6500mAh type and judging by size I believe it's build with 4 18650 cells.

[amirm]

Too late, I've bought one! Offered $200, got accepted.

Thanks for posting.  I offered $200 too and it got accepted.  And shipping went down to $60 from $69 for total of $260. 

[TurboTom]

After the positive inpressions that I got about that MICSIG scope in this thread, I decided to get one of the units as well to replace my worn-out "fleet" of portables (Philips/Fluke PM97 with intermittent defect, THS710A, hacked, otherwise okay, and a few others not even worth mentioning). Offered 190USD and got accepted. Including shipping and VAT/Customs to the EU, I'm closer to 300EUR than to 200... 

Anyway I was lucky in so far that the DMM section was working after I replaced the conductive pad on the keyboard silicone membrane (silicone sealant / RTV works perfectly to stick a salvaged conductive pad to it -- you won't be able to tear it off without damaging it.

On mine, the negative DMM socket was squashed to an extent that re-shaping it isn't possible. I guess this is done on purpose to make the DMM section (even more...) unusable. Fortunately these sockets appear to be standard parts and I'll replace them with some Hirschmann's.

The DMM section shows some peculiarities: When I first switch to DMM mode, the DCV is automatically selected and something like 0.19V is displayed (measurement teminals open). If I just let the instrument sit like this, the reading slowly (over some minutes) creeps to something close to 0. If I insert a set of leads (as far as that's possible with the damaged socket...) and short them out, the relaxation to 0 takes place almost immediately. Compared to a Rigol DM3068 6.5 digit bench meter, I found the DCV readings to be out by about 0.1% + 1digit (tested 0...30V on DCV and DCmV), so really nothing to complain about. The AC range is interesting since there is a big difference (frequency-wise) between the mV and the V ranges: I found the mV range to be working from approx. 10Hz to  30kHz (tested with different waveforms to verify RMS converter accuracy - square wave drops off first, sine will work accurately to almost 100kHz), so pretty useful for low-voltage audio stuff. The V range will do from 20Hz (amazingly at 10Hz it fluctuates heavily) to something like 1kHz. All the AC ranges had accuracies in the 1% range (once again compared to the aforementioned bench meter). The ohms and capacitance ranges appear to work within reasonable accuracy for quick checks.

Once I've replaced the sockets, I'm going to figure out what external shunt I've got to use for the amps ranges. It's a pity this wasn't included (but for obvious reasons...).

There's one more issue with the meter that probably affects all of them: The shielding can of the DMM section has the scoop pressed into it like it's used on one of the scope channels. In my case, despite of the insulation sheet inside, the edge of this scoop got so close to the positive DMM socket terminal that I wouldn't consider it safe to use. Just a slight spike will cause an arc-over, and since the shielding can is referenced to the negative socket, this may result in a major firework, depending on the circuit that's being measured. I simply ground off the projecting part of the scoop and everything's fine.

The scope section provides an impressive capture rate and initially I questioned myself how MICSIG gets that done with a single, pretty base-line FPGA, an SRAM and a DSP while the "desktop contenders" struggle to reach half that rate with at least two FPGAs, separate sampling and frame buffer memories, some glue logic (in forms of a CPLD) and a DSP. A closer look at the MICSIG reveals that it doesn't provide any intensity grading (as it has been reported before) but it also doesn't provide sin x / x waveform approximation, instead it uses only straight lines in "vector display mode" to connect the individual samples. Yet, a closer look at the sampling engine provides some interesting details: In fact, there isn't a sin x / x approximation taking place in the display engine, but (at least when doing single shots) at scan rates faster than 20µs/div (which equals 1GSa/s with a sample memory of 240k -- single channel operation), the sampling engine fills in up to 100 approximated (apparently sin x / x scheme is used here indeed) "virtual" sampling points into the sample memory between the "real" samples. This makes single shots at high scan rates still look rather neat. Zooming in into single shot traces reveals the nature of the signal processing, though. But in general and for the usual applications of portable scopes, there's nothing wrong with that.

In normal and auto trigger modes, the approximation may not be necessary since some "equivalent time sampling" can be utilized to visualize fast, periodic signals accurately enough.

I hope these findings may be of some interest.

Cheers,
Thomas

[amirm]

I received mine in about 3 days (they handed the last leg to USPS).  I am surprised about the quality and feel of the unit.  What I find especially positive is the intuitive user interface.  Walked through all the menu options in about 10 minutes and it all made sense.

Definitely a great buy at $260 all up.  Thanks to OP for bringing it to our attention.

[mtdoc]

Early on they had responded to my offer of $180 saying that $220 is the lowest they could go.  After reading recent posts I decided to try again with an offer of $190. They came back with $210 and then accepted $200. It's on its way.

We're setting up a "Maker space" at my kids school and this should be perfect for the little devils to use.  We'll see how it holds up to the abuse.

[TurboTom]

Some news on the multimeter function after I installed new input terminals:

It's quite amazing that DCV / DCmV ranges up to 5V and apparently ACmV range as well feature a high-impedance input (>>10MOhm), only ACV and DC 50V/500V/1000V ranges have the standard 10MOhm input resistance. This explains the relatively high residual voltages with open probes.

The current measurement range expects a 10mOhm four-terminal shunt connected across the input terminals (10mV eq. 1A). Maybe some clamp current probes may also work. Otherwise, my DMM section appears to work pretty accurate. Only the continuity buzzer is almost inaudible. I guess I've been lucky...

The final scope feature that would be really nice to have is the serial bus decode function. Since it actually triggers on a certain data byte, all the functionality is already there but it only doesn't display it. There must be a way to "liberate" this function...

Cheers,
Thomas

[mtdoc]

Mine arrived a couple of days ago.

The scope function is much better than I expected.- I'd never used a hand held scope and so I had low expectations....

It took some futzing around to find something to repair the meter button conductive pad with.  The salvaged pads I had around had too high of a resistance to work.  I ordered some of these and they worked a treat.

As others have mentioned - the voltage measurement accuracy - especially at the upper limits of its AC frequency range,  is not great.  It will be nice to have the meter functionality in any case.   Especially for the data logging function I think.

- When you attach probes and select the lowest vertical scale, the artifacts of a switching regulater start to appear. This was noticeable with the PSU connected.

At least on mine - that is only present if  the probe is near the AC charger's switching power supply.  Not surprising at all in that case and easily remedied by moving the PSU farther away or running on battery which I will almost always do in any case.

There's one more issue with the meter that probably affects all of them: The shielding can of the DMM section has the scoop pressed into it like it's used on one of the scope channels. In my case, despite of the insulation sheet inside, the edge of this scoop got so close to the positive DMM socket terminal that I wouldn't consider it safe to use. Just a slight spike will cause an arc-over, and since the shielding can is referenced to the negative socket, this may result in a major firework, depending on the circuit that's being measured. I simply ground off the projecting part of the scoop and everything's fine.

Thanks for pointing that out. I see what you mean but it did not appear quite as concerning to me.  I put some insulating tape in between just in case. The meter function will never see any high voltage - in my use.

I'm very happy with this purchase.  Incredible value for the price IMO.  Kudos to the OP.   I've been wanting a handheld scope for a while but could never justify the expense. 

This will be just what I need when helping out at my kids school maker space on electronics projects. We'll see how it holds up to the abuse that 6-12 year olds can dish out..

[blackfin76]

I've used the scope now for a few weeks and it has really grown to me. Is it a state of the art instrument? No it's not. But the best scope is the scope you have at hand and this one is a very nice one to take with you.

[eKretz]

I too snagged one of these. Thomas any ideas on that decode function?

[sotos]

Siglent SHS806 vs Micsig TO1102+Battery. What to buy?. ? want one of them, but which one.

[mstck]

I Just wanted to add my voice to the others who thanked the OP for bringing this device to our attention. I just received mine and I am pleased withe the purchase so far.  I would like to try reviving the meter but I do not have conductivity pads at hand. I will order some shortly.

Edit:

I just added a conductivity pad and connected the terminal which was cut, but no joy. The meter function does not appear to be available on this unit. Bummer.

[eKretz]

Mstck - are you sure your conductive pad is up to snuff? IIRC another member mentioned that the 1st one he tried didn't work. It looks like it has worked for everyone so far but two guys, did both of you try multiple pads or directly completing the circuit?

[TheAmmoniacal]

Follow-up .. Very happy with the scope, responsive and intuitive, lots of features - good value for money. Cheapish-feeling build and construction, but solid. Mine performs up to spec on both the oscilloscope section and DMM section. The only thing the scope is missing from the MS220T model is the probe compensation output option. I've spent a few days trying to flash the original MS220T firmware onto this scope to enable it, but without success.

For those thinking of getting one:
It's important to keep in mind that the scope comes with no warranty or support, Micsig does not acknowledge these scopes as theirs. They will never get a firmware update, the PC software will forever be 32-bit only (drivers) and existing bugs/flaws/missing features will never be fixed/added.