Just got a new Siglent SDS1202X-E, £361.08 delivered from 'lacamax-shop' on eBay.
I have a 60MHz Trio which I bought 30years ago and an aging Tektronics TDS210 (60MHz 2ch storage) and was looking for a nice new bit of kit for a project I'm involved with. I was looking for 2 or 4 channels, 300+MHz but saw this and thought... what the heck, I wonder what you get these days for 360 quid?
Immediately puts the old Trio and Tek to shame, good display, pretty responsive controls, lots of menus to get lost in : )
1G sampling is pretty limiting at the top end though.
A couple of things caught me out and I spent the last 4 house sorting out what was going wrong...
1st Bug:
Trigger setup can get confused and stop triggering. The fix is to wiggle the trigger level knob.
Details: Had the 'scope set to trigger in the middle of a 0-3v UART transit signal on CH1, trigger set to EDGE, RISING
Press trigger SETUP then press SLOPE, triggering stops sometimes. select RISING, triggering stops, now you can press a lot of things like Menu On/Off, Holdoff, SINGLE, NORMAL and it refuses to trigger. Press AUTO and it springs into life, press NORMAL and it doesn't do anything.
Wiggle the trig knob a bit and it starts again.
2nd Bug(s):
Threshold levels are wrong if you have X10 probe selected. Serial decode stops working. Easy fix it to set X1 probe.
Details: With a c. 0-3v UART signal on CH1, with X10 probe set, 1V/div you can press the trigger level knob to auto-set 1/2 level, the 'scope displays 1.4V and NORMAL trigger works fine. Then press DECODE, set Serial, UART, then set Signal. The Threshold adjustment went from -474mV upto 426mV and shows a dotted line on the trace which is consistent with that value (i.e. up and down by 1/2 a division at the bottom of the trace). If you adjust the line so it looks like it is on the signal, then decode doesn't work - because the line is wrong and the values displayed are wrong by a factor of 10.
I spent **AGES** wondering why decode wouldn't work (this is the same for I2C decode as well).
Bit if a side note... before setting up DECODE, you can set triggering to trigger on 'Serial', I set this up to trigger on 0x24 (the starting '$' character of a GPS message) and it worked fine - which was even more confusing when pressing DECODE, because you clearly see a serial string being triggered on a given character, but the decoder works independently with its own threshold values (that I had set wrong earlier).
A final tip
A lovely bit of kit for the price. If you already have a 'scope and/or thinking about 2 or 4 channels, remember that you can use the trigger output.
Cabling trigger out from the Siglent to the Ext Trig on the old Tek I have 4 channels on two independent timebases.
Still might get something else for RF work where I really need 300MHz or more, but now I think I'll look for a 2ch one and link it to the Siglent when I need to look at more channels of slower stuff.
Yours,
TonyWilk