Looking to get a basic oscilloscope eBay lists some cheap usb or arm based with screen units.

Does anyone have any experience of these are they a waste of money or worthwhile for quick and dirty checks of various car (and maybe hifi) based signals?

Any one in particular?

What sort of budget?

If it will stretch to £99 then you can get a entry level Picoscope, it will be a huge step better than most of what is on Ebay. With proper usable software.


http://www.picotech.com/entry-level-oscilloscopes.html

Edit Just noticed that the price is plus VAT and postage making it more like £130 and doesn't come with any probes.


[Edited on 9/5/14 by DW100]

I got a old Telequipment oscilloscope for £5 at an auto jumble but then I also have an Avo meter if you know what that is.

I'm sure I saw an Android based on somewhere, it got half decent reviews compared to the price. I can't find any sign of it now though!!

Go on to google play at the oscilloscope software, see if there are any links to DIY jobbies.

I have one of the DSO Quad mini scopes and, whilst better than nothing, they are very frustrating to use compared to a proper scope. The user interface is non-intuitive, and as they generally use enclosures designed for MP3/MP4 players, the button locations and icons also make little sense. The sample rate on the DSO Quad is reasonable, but the front end has a very poor frequency response meaning you can't get useful measurements at higher frequencies. It also has a very limited sample buffer (4k points).

The really cheap Arm based units (e.g. 'Nano DSO201' ) share the same disadvantages, but also have a low sample rate (1 MS/s) and the triggering can be flakey.

You can get a pretty decent new digital storage scope for around £200 now (e.g. Hantek, Owon, Siglent), and whilst not up there with Aglient and Tektronix, they are vastly more useful than the toy scopes. If you want a super budget option, the Hantek 6022BE USB scope works reasonably well for around £50, though you obviously need a PC/laptop to use it.

[Edited on 9/5/14 by MikeRJ]

They are fine for checking most the common car sensors, very useful for Hall Effect ABS and crank sensors also throttle position sensors.

If you want a simple, single channel portable scope, then the Velleman HPS140 is much nicer to use than the DSO Quad/201. It doesn't have the nice colour display, but it has decent bandwidth (40MS/s, 10MHz) and a far simpler interface.

The RRP is quite high, but they quite often appear on Velleman HPS140i Handheld Pocket Oscilloscope brand new in box for reasonable money.

Thanks all, very helpful.

I think I'm going to go for the Hantek USB based one as seems to tick all the boxes i need atm. And its about time I put one of my old laptop's in the garage.

I have an elderly Hewlett Packard, 100 MHz, 4 trace scope that I have had for ages, not used it much but when I need to see what is going on it does the business.

Some times things are much easier to visualise then just rely on a volt meter. Only thing is nowadays there are more and more self diagnostics around. They tell you what is wrong.

Adrian

[Edited on 10-5-14 by AdrianH]