I'm tempted - nice price - Rigol UK DS1052E scope

AllyCat

Senior Member
Hi,

Well, £239 certainly makes it much more tempting than £347. ;) I'm a great believer in having "real" knobs to twiddle and buttons to press. Also, a device designed for a specific purpose and not a "Jack of All Trades".

But that 320 x 240 pixels display does look rather "Windows Mobile 2003" vintage (which I'll admit to still using). A modern Phone/PDA/MP3 player close to that screen size would probably have around 800 x 600 pixels, and an Apple "Retina" display over 1M pixels.

Cheers, Alan.
 

srnet

Senior Member
I have one.

I bought it to replace my aged Velleman PC scope, this used a parallel printer connection and the code will not work on Windows versions above XP.

The Rigol is very capable, lots of knobs and switches to play with and there is a software hack somewhere that allows it to be extended up to 100Mhz.

I have not used it a great deal, so I cant really give a good view of its full potential.

One difference I noted between my Velleman and the Rigol is that the Rigol has a lot more bit noise than the Velleman ever had. I realise this is a by-product of a digital scope, maybe there is a option somewhere to filter it out.
 

manuka

Senior Member
If you don't need the features (or bragging rights !) consider Realt's Chinese "toy" LUCK-3 DSO. The ex works price is well under US$200-we've had cash strapped students import them here to great effect. (Note however that NZ & China have a free trade agreement so such imports are exempt tax & duty)
 

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Dippy

Moderator
I'd wait for a few replies before parting with cash.

My old Company, who filled every crevice with Tektronix, bought a Digimess from Farnell. it was a rebadged (rebodged?) Ch Ch Owon.

Thank goodness we bought it from Farnell. We sent it back for a refund within a few days.
Cheap it was .... cheap and nasty.
It was a really expensive bookend with unreadable fonts on screen. Software didn't work either.


Take care... look past the leaflet and headline price.
I fully understand people's budgets, but do wait for a few opinions by users of that model.
 

womai

Senior Member
I privately own the DS1102E, which is identical to the DS1052E except that it has twice the analog bandwidth. Excellent quality, very well built, and performance is as advertized or better. The GUI is well done and so far I haven't encountered any bug. I can highly recommend this instrument, especially at the price it sells nowadays. (this is from someone who has a lot of exposure to top-range Agilent, Tektronix and LeCroy scopes at work), Screen resolution is indeed not breathtaking but is sufficient. Noise is pretty reasonable even at highest sensitivity.

Word of caution, there are other Chinese brand scopes on the market that look similar and have similar specs, but from what I have read often have buggy interfaces and are much less well built. Atten is one example to stay away from. Meaning one China brand is NOT equal to some other China brand...
 

womai

Senior Member
Hi Stan,

as for the LUCK-3, the scope front panel looks like it requires to know Chinese? How about the on-screen menus, are at least these available in English? The spec talks about trigger delay, can it do pre-trigger acquisition (i.e. show what happened before the trigger)? What is the real screen resolutio, 480x234 or really 160x234?
 

manuka

Senior Member
Womai: Sorry- I've never owned (nor even used) this "toy" DSO, but don't recall any student gripes- perhaps they just added their own neat knob lables? Check this translation for specs.

FWIW: Their recent take off (& increasing student poverty) has made Android based scopes & spectrum analysers quite popular for simple work.
 
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