looking for oscilloscope recomendations

[cooldude666]

Hello all, i'm looking for suggestions on an oscilloscope. I bought a small handheld one but it's not what I needed (will return tomorrow) so now I'm looking into getting a better bench scope. Anyone have any suggestions for a good beginner scope? Is $300 a solid budget to get something with a quality feature set? I'd like one with 2 channels so I can view input and output signals from my circuits. I know some of ya'll have a scope on your bench that you love, tell me about it.

[bob p]

This topic comes up an awful lot. By any chance were you able to find any of the old threads? I remember some pretty detailed discussions about this. Maybe that information would be helpful to you.

[Kazooman]

Disclaimer: I am just a hobbyist, not someone doing this for a living. I bought a Rigol DS1052E a while ago and I am very pleased with it.

DS1052E 50 MHz Digital Oscilloscope | Rigol - Beyond Measure

[T9c]

Yuup, the Rigol is hard to beat for the money.

[bob p]

Time to get an O-scope...tips?

[Enzo]

yes we have this same discussion over and over. DO some searching in this section.

Your needs for guitar amps are really minimal as scopes go. You will be hard pressed to find a scope that won't have enough bandwidth, for example.

You can find perfectly good old Tek scopes for not a lot. A few years ago I decided to try one, and bought a $300 Tenma scope from MCM. It has worked flawlessly for me ever since.

[zeus1]

I think small handheld ones are not enough for good analyz

[jbltwin1]

I'm still using and old scope that I bought 25yrs ago for PENNIES because it was an older tube unit. Re-capped it the other day for safeties sake and it will outlive me, I am sure. Bandwidth? We don't need no stinking bandwidth! KIDDING. 20mhz is plent for an audio scope. !0mhz is too. Buy cheap and see if it helps you. You can always trade up later.

[bob p]

When shopping for a scope for audio work you can pretty much ignore BW. You'd be hard pressed to find *ANY* functional oscilloscope that didn't have sufficient BW for audio work. For example, a 1950-60s Heathkit 500 kHz scope has plenty of bandwidth for audio work. Higher BW scopes were made for TV and radio work.

I bought one of these on eBay for $0.99 just for the sake of nostalgia:

Heathkit Virtual Museum | O-11

Even at $0.99 it wasn't a good deal; the cost to restore it will easily exceed the cost of an inexpensive used solid-state scope.

[Kazooman]

A dumpster diver after my own heart! I bought this Heathkit VTVM on eBay, but I think I paid about $5.00. I obviously paid too much. The unit sorta worked, but had major issues. I finally had to resort to making a new printed circuit board for it. I took a picture of the pcb, brought it into Photoshop and after messing around with it for a while I was able to create a good image of the board and used the laser printer toner transfer method to transfer the maks to the pcb for etching. It worked great! A fun project.

[bob p]

you know, the Heath V-7 is a nice VTVM. I've got a couple of those that I bought on eBay and left on the back burner. I'd like to hear more about your PCB. Have you got the rebuild documented anywhere?

[Kazooman]

Sorry, I do not have any documentation for the rebuild. I did find a copy of the original manual somewhere on the Internet and that helped a lot with calibration.

You should understand that my version of the pcb is a working version that doesn't necessarily look as pretty as the original. I have made several boards this way for other restorations since this one and I have gotten a bit more sophisticated as far as getting nice straight lines on the traces that run off on diagonals. All I can say for this particular board is that it works!

I would be happy to send you a jpg or some other version of the file for you to use if you would like it. No guarantees, of course, I don't know if there were different variations on the boards way back then. I would also need to scratch my head to be certain that I didn't incorporate some changes from the original to suit my purposes at the time.

I would be happy to take a few more pictures of "gut shots" if they would be of use to you in repairing your VTVMs.

[km6xz]

A real VTVM is cheap to buy and can't be killed as easily as a DVM. Drawing an arc when removing probe from a live HV hi z circuit can fry a lot of digitial electronics. Use a DVM when you need accurate measurements, use a VTVM when you want to see trends and higher voltage and load the circuit under test the least. I always liked a mix of digital and analog meters on the bench, both types have advantages, and the VTVM is almost a must on tube amps.
Heath made a number of low cost kits that had the advantage of using standard parts, had comprehensive manuals that allowed the owner to maintain them for decades, are bullet proof, have very high input Z, and are dirt cheap.
The best ones for a serious bench are the old HP 410B or C. The "B" was an older version that looked the part in a vintage amp shop, while the "C" model was more compact, modern looking and is not pretty pricy in collector circles. They use a servo to drive the meter so its ballistics did not look like other meters, with very fast settling time and hardly any overshoot. The needle would zip to the value and be rock steady with no overshoot. They are available on eBay for less than they are worth....if they had the first to be missing...AC tube probe, that had a vaccum tube right in the probe. That allowed for accurate AC measurements to 700Mhz. All the cheap copies for sale have that important part missing. A good one, with AC probe will get $350 any day.
Scopes? It is almost impossible to kill a Tektronix 465 series 100Mhz scope. You can find one in good condition for $150 and it will be a trusted essential part of your workbench for years. When it was first made, it cost more than a typical family sedan, but then, everything in lab gear and studio gear did also. A good studio tape deck cost more than a Ferrari back the day, so high end scopes were built with similar care and worth their weight. They lasted so long that there are many still around to buy.
The new digital LCD scopes have a couple advantages; cheap, light weight, tossable if fails, has many calculated display values, and some with long memory can be useful in finding missing pulses in sequence. They do not handle HV or static as well as an old lab scope. They also do not display very low levels, such as random noise as well as an analog scope since digital becomes less and less resistant to quantization error due to the very low resolution at the lower end of the sensitivity range. As with any specialized digital gear, they become irreparable soon after the manufacturer changes models.

[bob p]

I'd sure like to have the HP 410C, but there's just no way that I can justify it's $350 price tag. And I'm a guy who has a $2000 4-wire Fluke 6-digit Kelvin meter.

My choice for a VTVM? I have a benchtop Heath unit that I found on eBay for $5, and a few of the $5 hand-held units like the one described above that are still on the back burner for parts and/or to be restored. It's pretty hard for me to justify the 70x price differential for the HP unless you just lust after one of them for the sake of collectability.

[Cygnus X1]

I just picked up the military version of the 410B (or C). for $10.00
It's a Micromin ME260/U.
But it's a boat anchor without the probes.
Someone had clipped them all off right at the face!

Thinking about gutting it for parts unless someone has the probes.
I also have an old Simpson VTVM, just needs...a probe.
I think I can fabricate one from a BNC.

On scopes, I have a Tektronics 466 that is nice but just needs cleaning.
My main (backup) is cheap Hitachi 20mhz V-212 that functions just great.
Using both channels tells me a lot I can't quite get with DMMs and such.