Gyro,
thanks a lot for the teardown, and posting this! Very timely. (I had been thinking of doing a comparative review vs. the 6022BE, and just ordered the Owon recently for that purpose. So you saved me quite a bit of time.)
The one real downside, spec-wise of the Owon is it's 5k samples per channel memory depth, versus a claimed 1M for the Hantek, not an issue for me, but might be for others.
Well, I'd consider the Hantek claim to be fraudulent, since the 1M isn't internal to the acquisition module. They could as easily have claimed 10M/channel, or 100M. IMO, if you're going to pull that kind of crap in your advertising, you have a responsibility to make it clear that you're leveraging the memory in the PC. Which Hantek "accidentally"
still fails to do (after having only years to correct it). The 6022BE has 1k/channel internally, and they should be honest, and admit that. Much of what we know about the Hantek device was only discovered after many folks here obtained them, and dug into their internals to expose the truth. Hantek played no role in that.
The Owon also uses (only needs) USB 1.1 vs the Hantek's USB2.
That's interesting. I say that because I was told specifically, and unequivocally by an Owon tech support person at Owon HQ that the USB1.1 was a leftover documentation error, and the actual interface was USB2.0. However, I see from the ADC spec-sheet that only USB-FS is possible through the isolation device. Which makes me suspect that the VDS-1022 (non I) has USB2.0, while the isolated version can do only USB1.1. Unless their Tech was FOS. There's certainly no reason, beyond the ADUM3160, that the Owon couldn't do USB2.0 w/o difficulty. (But also, not much reason to do so. Unlike on their higher-level VDS models, which have 5M or 10M/channel.)
It is in the architecture that I think the Owon wins. Where the Hantek just uses an EzUSB micro for interfacing the ADC to USB, the Owon includes a Silicon Labs SiM3U156 32 bit ARM Cortex-M3 CPU together with a Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA. There's clearly a lot more happening on-board than in the Hantek.
No kidding! The 6022BE cut every corner possible, and eliminated every component they could. The device is essentially nothing more than a low-speed sample streamer, with extremely limited front-end gain scaling (prone to truncating traces, on many gain settings). That's actually a very good chip-complement on the Owon.
...together with data compression needed to pipe the data via USB1.1 at decent refresh rate. It also results in very low PC overhead with minimal impact on running other applications even on a low-end PC.
I'm not sure any compression is required. With just 5K/channel, even sending it all over (which isn't necessary in real-time modes), that's at least 100 screen refreshes/sec.
The 5k memory depth is clearly a less desirable side effect.
While that's certainly very low, in comparison with many current DSOs, it actually better than what most DSO's had available for many, many years. At one point, 2K or 2.5K/chan was a "big deal". And with decent triggering (which the Owon has), 5K can provide very good results, along with the ability to zoom in a bit (perhaps up to 10x). While that's not going to challenge DSOs with 1000x, or 10,000x zooms, it's not bad for such an inexpensive device.
I'm not sure where the Hantek's triggering is handled, as it's edge only it could either be on-board or in the PC software.
There is
no on-board triggering of any kind, and it's ALL handled in the PC software.
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With pretty poor results at some sampling rates (highly unstable trace rendering).
The front end, which presumably includes the higher voltage attenuators, AC/DC selection and input amps is heavily screened in cans top and bottom side which I have no intention of trying to remove (another difference from the Hantek).
Yes, that's a big difference, and the residual noise levels are quite impressive on the Owon... FAR below those on the Hantek, even after extra shielding had been provided by owner-mods.
Video triggering is implemented using a dedicated Rohm BA7046 sync separator rather than all in s/w. There are several other packages that I haven't managed to identify in the analogue area, and there is a scattering of supply regulators around the board.
And again, it's impressive that they'd go to the trouble to incorporate a special chip, just to be able to provide Video triggering!
In terms of PC software, this is very subjective from user to user. I like the Owon for its lack of pseudo knobs (!) general screen layout and number of useful shortcuts (once you find them) and of course the added functionality.
Not having had an opportunity yet to operate one yet, I can't comment on usability. But in terms of look and feel, and cleanness of the UI layout, I'd say it's head and shoulders beyond the software provided for the 6022BE. As in, "generations apart".
Considering that the 6022BE generally goes for about $70, and the Owon VDS-1022 for about $50 more, I'd say that the Owon wins hands down. Unless that $50 is so important to you that you're willing to put up with endless aggravation with the 6022BE, in general-purpose scope use. OR you can make good use of the streaming capabilities of the 6022BE (which the Owon can't do at all). Streaming on the Hantek is quite powerful, so if you need to capture a large amount of data (at either a high OR low speed), then the Hantek has that use-case nailed. Just because the scope program that Hantek supplies limits you to 1M samples, doesn't mean that a simple App using their SDK can't capture far, far more than that. Capturing a gig of samples shouldn't be difficult.
Thanks again for your efforts, Gyro, and taking the time to share.
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