"A" brand instruments vs "B" brand

[BillyO]

Still looking for a comprehensive text book on modern digital oscilloscopes.

This you can forget, trust me.
I´ve been looking for years for it, it doesn´t exist.
Although all manuals are written in such a way that one obviously assumes that the user knows how a DSO works.
Examining white papers and knowing about digital signal processing seems to be the key.
And white papers you can get from all big brands, but also from siglent.

It's time I write one... 

It would be obsolete by the time you finished the first page.

[nctnico]

That's good advice, but I was thinking about a *general* textbook, upon which to learn how an oscilloscope really works (including all the theory about DSP in that context) and how to build one.

That would be nice, too. But there are things that are not so obvious that I have the biggest fear about.

For example, where I connect the ground makes a lot of difference, while in general it doesn't matter or can be ignored.

Another one is that digital scopes automatically limit bandwidth after going to some low mV per division of vertical resolution. Noted that while reading discussion thread on RTB2000 here... This should be in the scope manual or application notes, right?

That is in the oscilloscope's datasheet and/or user manual. Although there are not many oscilloscopes out there that automatically limit the bandwidth.  Typically a lot of details that are basically specifications can only be found in the manual. The datasheet is more like a cursory spec. sheet.

[BillyO]

IMHO the best place to start is the user manual of an oscilloscope (or any piece of test equipment) and the application notes / instruction videos to get a good grasp of what an instrument is capable of.

That's good advice, but I was thinking about a *general* textbook, upon which to learn how an oscilloscope really works (including all the theory about DSP in that context) and how to build one.

On top of the user manual you could take a gander at this: https://www.tek.com/en/documents/primer/oscilloscope-basics

[2N3055]

It would be obsolete by the time you finished the first page.

Is that a reference to me being slow  or you mean that relevance of data changes too fast.

Data about how to use and how digital scopes work are not really changing so quickly. Fact is that there was never a book on digital scopes written by anybody.
It would be possible to explain general concepts without going into implementation details and just speak about good practice and such...
Good explanation of sampling, memory depth, etc etc..

[Fungus]

Still looking for a comprehensive text book on modern digital oscilloscopes.

I think Dave's done a video on just about every aspect of oscilloscope usage.

The problem is finding them all.

[2N3055]

Still looking for a comprehensive text book on modern digital oscilloscopes.

I think Dave's done a video on just about every aspect of oscilloscope usage.

The problem is finding them all.

Dave made many nice videos. But there are many topics he didn't do or did very simplified. And you are correct 100% problem is that they are not organized into didactical structure and are hard to find. And therefore hard to learn from.

[BillyO]

Still looking for a comprehensive text book on modern digital oscilloscopes.

I think Dave's done a video on just about every aspect of oscilloscope usage.

The problem is finding them all.

Did you have a look at this: https://www.tek.com/en/documents/primer/oscilloscope-basics

[Martin72]

Fact is that there was never a book on digital scopes written by anybody.

There is a book in german avaible and it´s mainly a kind of manual of the authors scope...

A good useful book could build like this:
- Short explanation for what a scope good for is.
- Block diagrams of analog and digital scope, short explanation of the differences between the two.
- Then taking the single blocks of the DSO diagram as chapters where the functions will be explained.
- After this some measure examples to understand how the whole blocks are working together.
- Additional functions explanations like FFT, Decoding, Measures, XY mode and so on