Low-Cost USB Oscilloscope

[Darrel Taylor]

500Mhz Color DSO ?

A little Overkill for PIC work.

And I get excited when I buy something inexpensive that does exactly what I need.
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[T.Jackson]

500Mhz Color DSO ?

A little Overkill for PIC work.

And I get excited when I buy something inexpensive that does exactly what I need.
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I admit it -- I was spoilt in my last job having a Tektronix DSO. Had colour screen, direct readouts for RMS, PP, cursors and so on ... In fact, it was an overkill for the circuits that it was primarily used on (mostly RF on the 27MHz band) However, I believe it aided in speedy repairs. The old golden rule of thumb with CRO's is; it's better to have bandwidth of 5x that of what you expect to measure. A 500MHz CRO isn't suitable for anywhere near 500MHz work unfortunately.

[Darrel Taylor]

I always get confused with that.

I'd have thought a 500Mhz DSO would have accounted for the oversampling and expressed it as a 2G samples/second.

So that the "bandwidth" is actually 500Mhz.
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[T.Jackson]

Through software interpolation I think you'd be able to measure a repetitive waveform @500MHz, but for a one shot events I fail to see how.

[T.Jackson]

@500MHz with 2G samples / second -- that's only 4 sample points. Without black magic, how in the world could you capture much with that? (might suffice in purely the digital domain, certainly won't capture glitches though)

[Darrel Taylor]

that's only 4 sample points. Without black magic, how in the world could you capture much with that?

I don't really know. But I thought if the "Golden Rule" of 5x would work,
maybe silver was ok too.

And I guess I'm also trying to figure out what it would take to do the original post.

Assuming you want a 5Mhz "Bandwidth". Which way do you mean?
5Mhz bandwidth? Or 5M samples/sec?
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[T.Jackson]

I don't really know. But I thought if the "Golden Rule" of 5x would work,
maybe silver was ok too.

And I guess I'm also trying to figure out what it would take to do the original post.

Assuming you want a 5Mhz "Bandwidth". Which way do you mean?
5Mhz bandwidth? Or 5M samples/sec?
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When I say x5 -- I generally mean that, if you consider 100MHz to be your highest point of measurement, then ideally you'd probably be best of with a 500MHz scope. I think though however, this old saying is more applicable to analogue scopes than anything.

5MHz bandwidth for a DIY scope? -- personally, I'd be chasing 20M samples / second or more.