Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bmitc | Hacker News Reader

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Recently being in the market for an oscilloscope, I was strongly considering the Digilent Analog Discovery 2, but I ended up going with the Siglent SDS1104X-E.

https://siglentna.com/digital-oscilloscopes/sds1000x-e-serie...

Just got it a day or so ago but am so far really impressed with it. It should be good until I hit some point where I need to upgrade. At that point, I should have a better idea of the exact features I need, although it was tempting to pre-upgrade to the SDS2000 series. The Rigol's seem great, especially the MSO5000 series with dedicated controls per channel, but I've seen a lot of complaints about noise levels and preferred the more featured and cheaper Siglent.

I'll probably get an Analog Discovery 2 or a Digital Discovery if I need some more digital logic stuff, although the Siglent can do some decoding.

I really dislike my Siglent. The measurement UI is horrible and the probes are iffy. I’m still mostly using a relatively ancient Agilent 546xx (can’t remember which model) and some decent Keysight probes and will probably sell the Siglent.

The Rigol UI is painfully slow. I didn’t buy one because of that.

I actually have the opposite feeling.

I have used quite a few low-end scopes at work, a new Siglent, Agilent DSO7034A, Tek DPO3054, some Tek TBS2000, some RS RTB2 and Keysight 3034T. I prefer the RS if my boss is paying for it, but there isn't too much to complain about the Siglent.

The DSO7000 series (and those other VxWorks infiniums) are the direct successor of 546xx, it always work and it's nice to have a few Mpts of memory. But the feature set is quite limited, no intensity grading display and the FFT looks so poor compared with more modern scopes. I'd be happy to replace that DSO7034A on our bench with a Siglent.

The KS3000T also have a laughably slow UI. The touch screen is supposed to make cursor measurements easier, but it doesn't. If one VNC to it (yes, running Windows CE), one can get miserably 1 fps.

That's a fair evaluation. I mostly do RF stuff these days (SA + VNA) so the scope use cases are fairly basic. Mine's a 54642D so 500MHz + LA. I don't want to put down at least 50x what I paid for it ($100 broken - $10 fix) for a new scope. The Siglent fills the feature gap and but I don't like it.

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