Siglent’s SDS1202X-E Oscilloscope breaks yet another performance-to-price barrier! With features not available in most oscilloscopes at twice this price, it offers a higher bandwidth, processing speed, and, and FFT resolution than other scopes in this class.
The SDS1202X-E employs a new generation of SPO technology that provides excellent signal fidelity and performance. The system noise is also lower than similar products in the industry. It has a minimum vertical input range of 500 uV/div, an innovative digital trigger system with high sensitivity and low jitter, and a waveform capture rate of up to 400,000 frames / second (sequence mode). It also employs a 256-level intensity grading display and a color-temperature mode not found in other oscilloscopes in this class.
Serial bus trigger / decode comes standard.
With a waveform memory of 14 MB, the FFT function contains an impressive 1 MPts.
I am a relative newbie to Arduino and electronics, building mostly stepper motor controllers, camera interfaces and experimenting with ESP8266 devices. For everything but the stepper motor controllers (joystick controller), I was getting by with multimeters and literally touching LEDs to different contacts to see what was hot. When I started building and facing issues getting the motors to run reliably, it was frustrating. Luckily, I caught a YouTube vid that explained how to use an oscilloscope to see what signal the Arduino was putting out (PCM to control the speed). I needed my own scope and not needing something fancy, bought a kit costing about $20. I built it, put it all together, then… nothing. Bought another one and was able to get it to work. Alas, it was glitchy. I did learn a lot about soldering and do recommend doing this, but it was unstable enough (my own fault) that I wanted a proper product.
So I looked online and found a host of threads. Most pitted the Siglent against the Rigol, especially touting the number of channels in the latter. Other threads talked about the top-end frequency that each supported and how it affected the readings. It came down to the fact that a 4-channel high-frequency oscilloscope would cost about double what I was willing to spend. Though the Rigol and Siglent both had great reviews, I went with the Siglent as there would be easier calculations and adjustments for this newbie to make.
The main things I like about this device was the high frequency support (200 MhZ) that would potentially allow me to troubleshoot more complex devices (e.g., video cards, radios, etc.). Two channels is one more than I’m using currently. Even for a newbie, the layout of the dials was easy to learn. Others have reported that the multiple button presses to get to math and other functions was annoying, but honestly, I use things like saving to USB and some of the math functions infrequently enough that it’s not a concern. Display is easy to read.
Calibrating the probes was easy using the included screwdriver and the built-in reference signal.
I realize that $300 is on the high-side for a hobbyist (well, maybe :D), but after research this was most feature complete in that price range. I’m very happy with this purchase and hope to not soon outgrow it.