Which Oscilloscope for a pickup maker?

[salvarsan]

Nice find. I was looking high and low for a good linux box since belwar started this thread.

There is also the more capable (and expensive) BitScope.
BITSCOPE = PC OSCILLOSCOPES AND ANALYZERS

Eeeeewww linux!

Wimp.

-drh

[belwar]

Wimp.

-drh

The only thing worse than linux is mountain dew!

Actually I dont have a gripe about it. I've not used it. Im just being hornery for the sake of it. I started on macs in 1985, but moved to a trusty x86 when I started modeming in 1987 ish. Good old 1200 baud modems. That brick kept my office door open for 10+ years :> My favorite modem was my a supra 2400 with MNP which (with compression) got you to 9600 baud. That sucker was FAST.

Our business Ran on macs until 1997 (using hypercard) when we went to PC's to get a real accounting MRP system.

[belwar]

~$190 gets this one to your doorstep:
Syscomp Electronic Design Ltd.



2MHz bandwidth with a built-in signal generator and software that runs on Windoze, Mac, and Linux is all you'll ever need for audio work.
It does phase+impedance plots, too.
Below is one for an SK P90:



-drh

Not bad - I just pulled the trigger on one with a couple of probes. Cant wait to get it

[RedHouse]

The only thing worse than linux is mountain dew!

Actually I dont have a gripe about it. I've not used it. Im just being hornery for the sake of it. I started on macs in 1985, but moved to a trusty x86 when I started modeming in 1987 ish. Good old 1200 baud modems. That brick kept my office door open for 10+ years :> My favorite modem was my a supra 2400 with MNP which (with compression) got you to 9600 baud. That sucker was FAST.

Our business Ran on macs until 1997 (using hypercard) when we went to PC's to get a real accounting MRP system.

Wow dude that makes me feel young, was it 8086 or 80286? IIRC the 80386 came out around 1987 or so. (yes I was around)

My first PC was a 80286 with a whopping 60MB hard drive (woo hoo!) an old Compaq IIRC which I got used in 1992.

My O'scope is a Kenwood CS-4125, an analog scope which does everything I need in the audio spectrum. The only place it falls short is in viewing/capturing LFO waveforms. For instance in my Classic-Vibe (Univibe) it is hard to view the LFO waveform and it's inherant anomalys.

I really want to step-up to a PC based scope that I can use to read/capture events and store them for later. I have been looking at the sound card based stuff for some time but it has limitations imposed by the sound card.

I had been eye'ing the "Pico Scope" but I have never tried it. That CircuitGear unit looks good.

[belwar]

It was a 80286 with a TURBO button. I was always a fan of the 68000 motorola ships though. Motorola was always constantly pushing the envelope to move from CISC to RISC and intel lagged. Heck I dont even think the current intels are RISC Based.

[David Schwab]

Eeeeewww linux!

Linux is OK, but Mac OS X is better!

(AND, it's POSIX certified Open Brand UNIX 03)

I used to run LinuxPPC on my old Mac clone, and also BeOS, which was a very cool OS.

I always find it funny that a lot of Linux window managers use the NeXT Step/OPENSTEP theme, and NeXT Step became Mac OS X.

I still have a friend that's always trying to talk me into Linux, but I have to remind him that I wouldn't be able to run the Adobe suite, or ProTools.

But I'd use Linux over Windoze any day.

[mkat]

Linux for me (give me powerful command line and scripting environment not a toy), but I do use Windows for recording apps, which I don't have for Linux.

[David Schwab]

Motorola was always constantly pushing the envelope to move from CISC to RISC and intel lagged. Heck I dont even think the current intels are RISC Based.

No, they aren't.

But here's the funny part... Apple was always boasting the power of the IBM/Moto PowerPC processor, and people would say that Macs sucked for gaming.

Now all the major game consoles use either a PowerPC RISC CPU or a variation on it, and Apple switched to Intel processors! So the XBox 360 is closer to a PowerMac than a PC. Same with the Wii, but then Nintendo as using something similar to a G3 CPU since the Game Cube.

And that's OK, because the 8-core (Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors) Mac Pro is just stupid fast.

IBM wasn't interested in Moto/Freescale's Altivec vector processor, and IBM just wasn't getting the clock speed any higher.

Meanwhile I'm typing this on an eight year old G4 with upgraded CPU.

[David Schwab]

Linux for me (give me powerful command line and scripting environment not a toy), but I do use Windows for recording apps, which I don't have for Linux.

You mean like this?

Here's a Bash shell running top.

[salvarsan]

Not bad - I just pulled the trigger on one with a couple of probes. Cant wait to get it

The CircuitGear thingus fails to suck, IMO.*


SysCompDesign also has a bunch of application notes, manual, and project briefs for it.



Once I figured how to get a clean pickup impedance curve, I went on to spec an obsolete loudspeaker so I could find a replacement. It paid for itself with that.

In truth, the oscilloscope sampler isn't special but the on-board signal generator and sprectrum analyzer application software make a very useful package.

-drh

[Joe Gwinn]

I've been using this book called "Teach yourself electricity and electronics" to teach myself more about what makes pickups tick, and I've been thinking of buying a basic Oscilloscope. I'm still at the point that I don't know what I'm looking at, so I need some help in choosing a model. I'm just going to buy a cheapy on E-bay .. Not more than $300. For that I can find something reasonable and calibrated. So here are my questions...

How many channels are needed? It's common to see both 2 & 4 channel.

I had a 4-channel, but never used more than 2 channels.

What frequency.. 60mhz? 100mhz? 400mhz? My guess is ANY of them because we're talking about items in the khz range.

I would get 100 MHz. The problem with 60 MHz is that this is aimed at the cheap-at-any-price crowd. I have a 100 MHz scope (Tek TDS3012B).

There is a few models that are plentiful on E-bay that seem to fit the bill. They are all made by Tektronix.. The specific models im look at are

Tektronix 2232 , 2246, and 2335.

Would any of these be good? Anything I should avoid? Anything else I need?

Tek makes very good scopes, so these are all going to be good scopes, for someone. What are you trying to do? $300 is pretty limiting in scope territory, so some precision is necessary.

[mkat]

You mean like this?

Here's a Bash shell running top.

Ha, ha, yes . I was surprised in a good way when I heard about the Unix interface on Mac a few years back. I started off with Mac's actually, I've been used to the Unix programming environment over 10 years so I stay there as much as possible , look at my location LOL.

[David Schwab]

Ha, ha, yes . I was surprised in a good way when I heard about the Unix interface on Mac a few years back. I started off with Mac's actually, I've been used to the Unix programming environment over 10 years so I stay there as much as possible , look at my location LOL.

I started messing with Linux before OS X came out so I could get familiar with Unix based systems, and I was also using Solaris and Irix machines at work.

I rarely use the CLI anymore, but it's nice to have in certain situations. OS X also has X11 installed.

[automan]

You mean like this?

Here's a Bash shell running top.

You should try htop. It's just like top, but better.

[automan]

I started messing with Linux before OS X came out so I could get familiar with Unix based systems, and I was also using Solaris and Irix machines at work.

I rarely use the CLI anymore, but it's nice to have in certain situations. OS X also has X11 installed.

I started with Gentoo in 1999, but recently switched to Linux Mint, which is just Ubuntu with all the media codecs installed by default. I look forward to switching back to Gentoo, but they need to get their profile system back in good standing.

This is my current desktop: