A friend of mine (one who has been enormously helpful to me in the past) needs to borrow an oscilloscope. It's to set up some complex thing; the heads on some sort of video equipment I think. TBH I couldn't follow his technobabble. Is there anyone not too far from Doncaster/Rotherham who could lend him one? I'd do the running about.
Bill
I wonder if he could use Audacity, which goes up to 20kHz?
thats a point as it sounds like the friend wants to check/adjust the switching points on the helical scannning heads.....
As an aside, who still uses a VHS recorder?
S.
Depending on the bandwidth he needs you might get away with Daquarta or one of the other software scopes that uses the sound card for input.
It is quite handy for popular science lectures on music and sounds.
Would that be dealing with a 6MHz baseband signal ?
You've got Nyquists sampling theorem and needing to have a bit more speed to do a good job. Plus, for video work, there are probably some "canonical views" that an expert would appreciate seeing. Not just any old lousy oscilloscope trigger.
Are there still TV repair shops ? Or are they gone gone gone ? Maybe someone in such a shop, knows how to adjust the head on a player.
Paul
One here if you are stuck Bill - double beam 20Mhz.
If its tracking and head position then its relatively easy with a bog standard scope in them old days of the N1700, we shall not speak of a multi head Toshiba Betamax. Brian
There are some affordable USB and held held scopes on eBay that are circa £40.
From China:
Cheers! There's a possibility that I might have got a borrow from a chap just down the road, but if it falls through I'll be in touch.
Bill
williamwright pretended :
No Problem, you know where I am, just up north of you.
If your friend is doing this sort of work on a regular or even just a semi-regular basis, he might be better off investing a little of his hard earned into a modern DSO that provides a comprehensive range of video triggering options.
Modern 'entry level' Digital Storage Oscilloscopes (DSOs) are quite cheap by the standards of the 2nd hand dual beam 50 and 70MHz BW Tektronix 'Boat Anchor' oscilloscopes that were typically on sale at prices I couldn't afford (over a hundred quid when that was 'real money') at amateur radio mobile rallies circa 35 years ago.
You can now buy a brand new dual channel 200MHz BW Siglent SDS1202X-E for a mere 360 quid (including free delivery) from two of the three official UK Siglent agents (Telonic Instruments being one and Labtronics the other - the less said about the third, the better).
I paid Labtronics 365 quid for mine just over two and a half years ago (a year's worth of a pound a day savings - cheap enough that most ten year olds could probably save the price of the 'scope in less than a year's worth of their pocket money allowance).
I mention this model since it offers a comprehensive range of video triggering options he might find very useful to his current task. He can download the specification datasheet and the user manual pdf files to check out this DSO model for himself.
Siglent provides access to all of their datasheets and user guides for their entire range of test and measurement kit for anyone interested to download as pdf files.
Another nice thing about modern oscilloscopes (DSOs) is their vastly reduced bulk and weight compared to the boat anchors of yesteryear. That SDS1202X-E model for example only weighs in at a mere 2.6Kg with dimensions specified in mm as 312L, 132.6W and 151H where W is front to back depth and L is the front panel width.
No longer do you need to decide where to semi-permanently locate most modern day T&M kit in your workshop as was once the case with those ancient, if venerable, boat anchors.
It's quite possible that such considerations as to where to make room for such kit may well explain why he doesn't already possess a DSO of his own if he hasn't kept in touch with all the recent developments in T&M kit over the past decade or so.
Interesting post. Thank you.
Bill
I?d agree with the above. Have a look on Farnell.co.uk for oscilloscope and sort for increasing price. There?s a whole bunch of pretty cheap devices these days. Digital scopes got a bad reputation in the early days, as they didn?t sample fast enough and often told you lies when looking at modulated rf waveforms. These days that is largely behind us.
The Siglent stuff looks very competitive compared with my Gould OS4020!!
As an offshoot, does anyone know of a comparable/competitively priced
500MHz frequency counter?
I have one, and am very pleased with it.
I bought it last year, direct from siglent.eu. Ordered at lunchtime, and here the next day, from the Netherlands (yes, I paid for fast delivery).
I bought some other Siglent gear, too. I wanted to get it all before Brexit kicked in.
Presumably you were able to make a significant saving compared to ordering from a UK official Siglent agent.
I chose Labtronix on the basis that they were a long established company based in the UK and bound by SOGA and the free delivery on orders worth more than 70 or 75 quid took only 3 business working days.
Much later (last year), I chose Telonic Instruments for the same reasons (plus I'd lucked out on getting a generous discount) when I upgraded to an SDS2104X Plus (now hacked to a 2504 with all the trimmings). I don't think I've had to wait more than week tops for delivery with either of these establishments.
I've kept hold of the 1202 since it's still a very useful 'scope for the bulk of my hobby activities. It's more compact and lighter in weight and boots up in only a third of the time taken by the 2504 which makes the
1202 look like a toy by comparison.Also, it only consumes 22W versus the 54W consumed by the 2504. The wider bandwidth, additional two channels, features and a lower noise floor front end all come at a cost.
The fourfold upfront purchase cost isn't the only one to consider, there's also the energy consumption cost as well although that's unlikely to add much more than a fiver to the annual electricity bill even if I didn't have the 1202 to fall back upon for all but the most demanding of tasks.
Whilst I had been expecting to see an increased energy consumption somewhere in the region of 15 to 20 watts, that 32 watt increase had rather taken me by surprise.
I wouldn't mind so much if the boot up time had been only a little more protracted than the 1202's 16 seconds but the 2504 takes a full 46 seconds! That's longer than my desktop PC takes which also boots a Linux OS (admittedly,from a 250GB SSD rather than flash ram).
I can only surmise that the doubled up channel count and the larger feature set has increased the boot up burden somewhat probably involving timing constraints that can't be mitigated by simply throwing more processing power at the task. Hey ho, the price of progress I guess? :(
Or a Cossor 1049 in my day.
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