For a number of years I’ve had some older analog oscilloscopes without storage capabilities, paired with a Saleae Logic, which has done well for my use cases in general, but there are some limitations. If a signal was faster than the Logic could capture, or not perfectly repeating to be visible on the non-storage analog scopes, it wasn’t something I could easily capture.
Recent years have seen a number of inexpensive but very capable entry level DSOs (Digital Storage Oscilloscopes) enter the market including the widely discussed Rigol DS1054Z.
I recently had an occasion to try and capture a very fast, but not frequently repeating signal in the phase comparator circuit of my homebrew GPSDO boards, and it wasn’t a good match for either my analog scopes or the Logic, so I took it as the impetus to finally pick up a DSO. The Rigol DS1054Z is a few years old at this point, and while there’s a firmware tweak to enable 100MHz operation, more recent options with a few years of advancement means that the Rigol is competing with newer, faster scopes, with more features in the same price bracket.
I ended up picking up the Siglent SDS1202X-E, which is a 200MHz, two channel scope. While I’m not any real reviewer, and am not going to touch the surface on the features, I will say I’m pleased with how it’s working. It was able to illuminate the signals I was interested in within a matter of minutes after getting it out of the box. I look forward to being able to get a better view of signals in my projects that I had avoided or worked around during testing in the past.
