Model Railway Forum

An oscilloscope is an invaluable tool to any electronics hobbyist. They can be had from a bit over $200 up to multiple thousands, dependent on specifications whereby max measurable frequency is an importand price factor.

If you don't need to measure frequencies over 20 MHz a portable USB scope with a very affordable price tag of about $60,- can be a very nice tool. A laptop or an Android phone / tablet serves as display.

I recently got myself the Hantek 6022BE and I am very pleased with it. The video shows an overview of six diferent software apps that are available for it. Future video's will go into more detail on the individual apps.

Link to Hantek 6022BE Overview of Six Software Apps

Hantek make great 'scopes, and reasonably priced when compared to say, Tektronix. Earlier this year I treated myself on my birthday by replacing my 20+ year old Philips CRT model with the Hantek DSO 5102P. I was going to buy direct from China but amazingly found it slightly cheaper on Amazon UK! I did look at the display-less models but couldn't be bothered with the additional cables and apps etc. Brilliant bright display when compared to the old CRT which I then sold on the bay for over £60.

For those who are interested ... a video about the Hscope for Android app that can be used together with the Hantek 6022BE USB scope module, and with many other hardware modules.

Link to Hscope for Android - Hantek 6022BE

With digital scopes you have to be careful with bandwidth and sampling rates.
A 100 million samples / second scope is only good for 1MHz bandwidth.
This is because to see a nice sine wave on the screen takes about 100 samples.

If you just want to use one for low frequencies then there are some very cheap items on ebay.
i.e. 20 million samples/sec scope for about £30.

Well .. this is only partly true ... actually a sine wave can be represented by just 2 samples. But of course the higher the sample rate the better ... but also the more expensive. See this blog post for a €20,- DSO:
https://rudysmodelrailway.wordpress.com ... scope-kit/