My first digital that drives like an analog
I've made a bit of a hobby of buying and restoring analog and early digitial oscilloscopes. My collection of rescues are all Tek, from a 485, through a 2467, a 2430 to a TDS784D. The 2467 is an easy favorite daily driver, but the digital Tek scopes only get turned on at need when I need to look at slow or one-time events. Mostly this is because they're slow and loud and clunky.
This scope is different - this is the first digital scope I use that drives pretty much like its analog brethren. You can pile up cursors and measurements and FFT and analog and digital channels, it just never slows down.
Beware that the real-time sampling rate on this scope maxes out at 200MS/s (single channel), though it does have equivalent time for repeating signals. Unlike my Tek scopes, this one will try its hardest to sample at max rate and squeeze all the data into 10DIV. This means that at 1-2ms/DIV and faster, it's running at full capture speed. If you stop the capture and zoom in to the captured record, you'll see a sample every 5ns. The measurement capability is pretty decent overall, although the FFT is pretty anemic as it's fixed at 2048 points.
The sensitivity on this scope is 2mV/DIV native and it makes like 1mV/DIV by doubling - the manual admits as much. The input offsets are roomy, from +-5V at 10mV/DIV to +-100V at = 200mV/DIV.
This allows you to e.g. watch ripple and slow DC drift on top of a 3.3V power supply at 1 or 2mV/DIV. Note that the offset is rolled into the vertical position controls, so you just keep turning the control after the vertical position goes off the top/bottom of the graticule.
The UI is all like that - quite intuitive and analog-like.
Most functions are either dedicated buttons or single-level menus, but for arcane trigger options and other rarely-used features you may have to drill in another level.
Triggering on this scope is super-versatile, in addition to the usual edge triggers it has SPI, I2C, CAN, USB, LIN, TV, sequence, duration - you name it.
I haven't used the logic channels in anger yet, but AFAICT this scope does no decoding.
I upgraded the firmware on mine from 1.50 to 2.31, which netted me a 5-digit hardware counter, bugfixes and a bunch of new triggering options. The firmware is available from the HPAK (Keysight) website.
This one boots faster than my 2467 by some margin, but the fan is unfortunately annoyingly loud.
If you buy one, make sure you get the digital pods, as they're hard or dear to come by otherwise.Read full review
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: Pre-owned
