School me on Oscilloscopes

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Hey everyone. I have access to an old bench top oscilloscope from the late 80’s that I use occasionally at my office. It works just fine, but it’s my employers and I don’t have unfettered access to it.

I use two fairly basic multimeters right now, a Fieldpiece and a Fluke. I’d like to get a full blown oscilloscope for my home workshop.

I understand that there’s a fair amount of animosity towards Flipsky products, but does anyone have any experience with their DS213 Mini Oscilloscope?


Seems too good to be true at 165 bucks.

Also found this on amazon for 190 bucks:
https://www.amazon.com/Cheffort-Pocket-Sized-Oscilloscope-Maintenance-Engineering/dp/B07TGGQDCT/ref=sr_1_19?dchild=1&keywords=oscilloscope&qid=1588864065&sr=8-19

Are there any decent budget oscilloscopes available for under 500 bucks, or should I be prepared to spend between 500 and 1000 bucks and get a brand like Siglent?

https://www.amazon.com/Siglent-SDS1104X-oscilloscope-channels-standard/dp/B0771N1ZF9/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&keywords=oscilloscope&qid=1588864065&sr=8-4

Thanks in advance for your input.

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That flipsky is a rebrand. Search youtube for the interesting stuff you come across. There are a few channels that are almost devoted to testing cheap china test equipment.

I think rigol 1054z might still be the standard low end actually usable scope.

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I stopped reading as soon as I saw flipsky… :face_vomiting:

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:roll_eyes:

The important bit comes immediately after the link, guy.
“Seems too goo to be true” and then I segued to actual products from legit companies.

Thanks for the shitpost though!

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Nothing beats an analogue oscilloscope, but it’s not for everyone.

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Keysight have some dirt cheap scopes

Edit: huh, never mind the prices up… i had picked up mine for around 400$

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DS213 isn’t made by Flipsky, they just also happen to produce/rebrand

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If you’re lucky you can hunt down a second hand real nice one for a fraction of its original price.
My personal fav so far is a 4 channel rhode swartz in the giga range bandwidth, they’re freaking expensive tho.

Keysight and sigelent are good starters if you havn’t fiddled much before. anything in thier 300-600 bucks range should do.

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USB scopes will work really well for budget approaches

Personally I do more digital stuff every day so logic analyzer and multichannel is important to me.

here’s an example

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Step one, search keysight
Step two, empty wallet into computer
Step three, you have a scope

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I’m going to school for automotive technology and we are switching from SnapOn to Pico for oscilloscopes. The least expensive PicoScope is $140 for a 4 channel. They go up significantly from there. They do require a computer to view the signal but their software is free.

Edit - $140 for the 2 channel, $450 for the 4 channel

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@agressivestreetlamp - This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! Thank you. I will do some more research in this regard.

@Jellybean - Awesome. I will check out the picoscope line too and compare. I have plenty of spare computer hardware laying around.

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I got a RIGOL DS1054Z that you can unlock (most chinese suppliers do it for you) so that you end up with a 100mhz 4 channel scope with all the nice extra modes.

An Oscilloscope is a one time investment - don’t go too cheap or you will end up with 3 cheap ones until you finally get a proper one.