OWON VDS1022I Quick Teardown (versus the Hantek 6022be)

[SIBtronics]

have the owon vds 1022i comming in the mail, decided on that, since i dont think i will need 4 channels or 250mhz single channel bandwidth any time soon, the thing is there is no catch, of course it has a lower bandwidth and lower sampling rate but with owon its you get what it says. my college uses (desktop) scopes from owon and they are decent. as for the record lenght idk. will check when it arrives

[John Celo]

Too late, mine is already coming in the mail too!
With some ali coupons and sale got it for 26.88eur with 5day delivery. Not bad at all.

Was also considering HANTEK DSO2C10 for around 105eur.
HANMATEK DOS1102 (owon SD1102, 100mhz band, but 20mV/div) for around 85eur
HANMATEK DOS1104 (5mv/div, 100mhz, 4ch)  for around 125eur

Didn't want to deal with hantek bullshit even at 'low' price of 105eur.
Was seriously considering DOS1104, but 125eur is almost 1/3th-1/4th the price of Rigol DHO802/DHO804.

I just don't know how hard the limited record length and trigger options of DOS1104 and other low end owon-derivatives affect their usefulness.
Maybe I should have gotten DOS1104 for 125eur, because opporunity to buy it at such price won't come again anytime soon.
Ordering oscilloscopes from AE (effectively no warranty) seems like a risky endeavour too.

Worst case scenario I wasted 27eur. Other things I have gotten from ali, like AN8008 for 13eur have been perfect for a beginner like me.

[Gyro]

I think you'll be happy with your decision, especially at that price! Don't get too hung up on buffer length, memory is cheap these days on desktop scopes but the Tek TDS210, which still sells for healthy prices on ebay has precisely half as much and the 1022. The more expensive but lower bandwidth and sample rate Picoscope 2204 only has 8k too.

Higher USB bandwidth loading tends to go along with bigger buffer size. The Owon has particularly modest USB bandwidth requirements, hence it is possible to provide the highly desirable USB galvanic isolation VDS1022I, which none of the others have.

At this price range you can't have everything, but it's a good compromise.


P.S. For long buffer length on digital stuff you can't beat a <$10 8 bit Saleae clone and Sigrok Pulseview s/w (not real buffer - it's all in the PC).

[SIBtronics]

Have now just got the scope, it is good, doesnt feel cheap and doesnt work like a cheap scope. compared to the handyscope hs3s we have at college it behaves the same essentially and these are much more expensive (though also have 50mhz bandwidth, 16bit mode and awg). having also used a tds 220, i certainly prefer this to it, the tds 220/210s screen is awful, of on the owon the frequency and sampling rate is more limited but for me thats totally fine. I use florentebrs software, it works very nicely and i cant really complain about it, the lack of virtual dials is a plus for me tbh. i cant really see the complaints about the software, of course florentebr added some stuff, but the ui itself which is the same as the og one as far as i know is good. i havent tried out the recording capability in depth yet, it works with a single usb A, the dual usb a thing really is a thing of the past. did some lissajous figures of course, works aswell, although they do look nicer on an analog scope. the fft works too, not that i have too much use for it. the trigger is rock solid. edit: just checked the handyscopes specs and besides analog bandwidth, and  wavegen these are the same spec wise.

[John Celo]

I've also received the scope. Tested and it works well with florent software.
The only thing you have to do in addition to following instructions on florent github (install java JRE) is to get 'Zadig' to install USB-drivers for the device.

First impressions - It will definitely be useful (especially as educational tool), but I would have been pretty disappointed if I paid the full price for it (which is in 70-80eur range).
Right now I'm just hooking it up to everything and measuring things, such as looking at various LDOs and switching mode regulators on various MCUs I have.
5k record depth is just not good at all. Can't really zoom out or zoom in any captured signal to see more.

For full price it's really old & outdated and I would not recommend it. Actually any of the oscilloscopes with record length below atleast 1M is out of the question.

Oscilloscopes is just one of those things that are not possible to cheap out on.

I'll write a more indepth review some week(s) or month(s) later after I've had more time with it.

[cunningfellow]

Does anyone have a source of the BNC sockets on the VDS1022?

I have some that the plastic ring has perished.

[TizianoHV]

5k record depth is just not good at all. Can't really zoom out or zoom in any captured signal to see more.

For full price it's really old & outdated and I would not recommend it. Actually any of the oscilloscopes with record length below atleast 1M is out of the question.

I have one too, 5k memory is quite limited, 100k would have been much better, I don't know what they were thinking. Anyway, you have to remember to set a wide enough timebase, with a bit of practice you get used to it.

I would like to remember how most of these chinese USB / battery oscilloscope can't work reliably with normal and single mode trigger. Probably due to software triggering or bad implementation.
The Owon on the other hand never misses an event and in general is always reliable.

Does anyone have a source of the BNC sockets on the VDS1022?
I have some that the plastic ring has perished.

I usually never screw them in because they seem flimsy. There's still enough grip to keep them from disconnecting.

[Gyro]

I've also received the scope. Tested and it works well with florent software.
The only thing you have to do in addition to following instructions on florent github (install java JRE) is to get 'Zadig' to install USB-drivers for the device.

First impressions - It will definitely be useful (especially as educational tool), but I would have been pretty disappointed if I paid the full price for it (which is in 70-80eur range).
Right now I'm just hooking it up to everything and measuring things, such as looking at various LDOs and switching mode regulators on various MCUs I have.
5k record depth is just not good at all. Can't really zoom out or zoom in any captured signal to see more.

For full price it's really old & outdated and I would not recommend it. Actually any of the oscilloscopes with record length below atleast 1M is out of the question.

Oscilloscopes is just one of those things that are not possible to cheap out on.

I'll write a more indepth review some week(s) or month(s) later after I've had more time with it.

I'm puzzled by the Zadig reference, It's not something I've ever had to do as both the stock S/W and Florent's S/W install the driver. You got me thinking that maybe I had always installed Florent's after the stock S/W, but then I remembered I had recently (only) installed his S/W on a Win7 VM under linux and it worked fine (the JRE is of course required). The Linux version works too of course.

Just looking back the start of the thread, my original review and teardown was in 2015 and the model is still available. It carved a niche at that price point that has pretty much survived ever since, based on price/performance. The only 'competitor' at the time was the Hantek USB range, that had no buffer, well maybe a couple of hundred bytes in the EZ-USB microcontroller (despite what the spec says) and relied on streaming everything in real time and triggering in PC S/W. There are certainly low end handheld and bench scopes coming down the line now but still not to the same price point (unless you get really lucky on Ali with some less known/unknown brand). The only real competitor in the USB space and H/W quality, as I mentioned previously, is the significantly more expensive, Pico 2204A. This arguably has much more flexible S/W (shared with the higher end models), but when you look at the fine print, it drops to 50Msps when you turn on both channels and it still has only a 8k samples buffer (I'm not clear whether this is per channel or shared, like the sample rate). I don't know of any low end USB scopes that have 1M buffers.

The 5k (per channel) buffer is certainly a limitation, it makes you go back to 'traditional' scope usage techniques - if you want to look at more detail of an edge, you increase the timebase and trigger on that edge rather than trying to zoom it up from a long capture (in your previous post, you mentioned several seconds). Unless you are massively oversampling, there is no such thing as the 'zoom and enhance' that you see in films. It's instructive to go into the display menu and switch from 'Vector' to 'Dots' to get an actual picture of how many samples the display of a particular waveform feature is being based on. If there are too few, you need to go to a faster timebase.

I was a unclear, from your previous post, about your requirement for capturing a couple of seconds of a fixed frequency (20-40-60kHz). If you are looking at one or more logic signals, a <$10 logic analyser, streaming to the PC is definitely the way to go. Again you need to fall back on traditional methods - the scope was used for evaluating the analogue domain integrity of a logic signal (rise and fall times, overshoot, crosstalk / ground bounce etc) and then the logic analyser for long captures and data decoding.

Looking forward to your more in-depth review anyway. Don't forget to pick up the keyboard shortcuts, they speed up the UI considerably.

[John Celo]

Unless you are massively oversampling, there is no such thing as the 'zoom and enhance' that you see in films.

Why wouldn't you massively oversample if your sample rate allows for it?
That seems like a default sane behavior if you have the sample memory for it.
100MS/s offers plenty of opporunities to oversample when you're zoomed out a bit (I find it's rare that I look at the signal at the very limits of the device's sample rate)

Even this scope oversamples teeny bit by default (two samples per pixel on 1080p screen), but limited memory lets you zoom in one step before there's less than a sample per pixel - thus zooming in more would be pointless.

Similarly to zoom out from captured signal, you are not limited by sample rate, purely by sample memory.

5k memory is barely enough to fill a 4k screen to have a sample per pixel.
Of course you can't zoom out. Neither can you zoom in. 5k memory simply does not allow for that.

You can't zoom out from a captured signal at all, because well.... that would require some memory, and this thing has barely any.

I apologize I lost my temper a bit, that "in the films" remark really got me LOL. You can do everything like in the movies and more, including time travel to past if you have the memory for it darn it(or bandwidth to stream it over USB at full speed to a computer that has bountiful memory)!

One of the signals I'm looking at has noise spikes roughly every 500ms/1s (those periods can't be captured by edge trigger since the amplitude of the noise is the same, just way more of it). Precise timing of which I can't tell...... because it doesn't have enough samples.

For other signals and LDOs I can see that 3.3v LDO greatly amplifies noise spikes coming from USB VBUS at ~90kHz and no other aperiodic spikes. So no issues analyzing signals of that type.