Get ready for more oscilloscope screen shots after yesterday’s sneak preview…

These come from a Hameg HMO0722, which is techno-babble for “70 MHz bandwidth, 2-channel oscilloscope”:

It’s the “little” brother of a series of 8 scopes, covering 70..200 MHz bandwidths in 2- and 4-channel versions.

There are three aspects of this series which make it stand out, IMO:

• The display: full VGA, 640×480, with lots of room for graph detail and informational text
• The software: this thing is packed with features, such as the above one-button “Quick View” mode
• The hardware: small, quiet, fast-sampling, sensitive, deep memory, and an optional logic analyzer

I’m not going to do a full review here – I wouldn’t even know how to do that, but more importantly, this isn’t really a story about a specific scope, but more an impression of the sort of capabilities you can find in a modern digital oscilloscope nowadays. FWIW, the HMO series costs from ≈ €1300 .. €3400 – depending in part on what options are included (the logic analyzer adds €345 .. €690, for example) – pretty hefty price tags!

The above screen shot was made via a USB stick, which is why it can be shown here in jaw-dropping resolution. The automatic measurements shown above are extremely convenient, with lots of attention to detail and precise tags / markers. Note that this mode is “live”, i.e. it tracks the signal while the scope is running.

The sampling rate is the maximum 2 GSa/sec in this case (a 1 KHz signal from one of the test pins). That means you can stop the scope and zoom in to see considerable detail: 2 samples per ns, 100 ns/div, 12 div/screen is 2400 ADC samples, just for this single screen. When only one channel is active, the scope cleverly re-uses the spare channel’s memory to store 2 million samples (looks like it’s actually a bit more).

Here is the zoom function, pushed to the limit (the top is an overview pane, the bottom shows the details):

There are 4 sample points per division (the rest is merely interpolated), but as you can see when moving the horizontal trigger time, it really has one sample every 500 picoseconds. Note the rise time, which seems to be about 10 ns for this 70 MHz model. Zooming back out gives me slightly more than 1 ms, so there really are over 2 million samples available to look at: one “up” and two “down” flanks of the 1 KHz square wave.

There’s a catch, however. Such extreme acquisition rates would require phenomenal amounts of processing power if you wanted to capture everything and display up to 2000 waveforms per second, as this model claims. Usually, this scope will not go fill its memory to the limit, but trade refresh speed for sampling depth (it’s all configurable). This reduces the “blind time” when the scope isn’t capturing but busy processing and presenting the information.

So much for raw power. Speaking of power: this scope draws 22 Watt when in use, and 0.4 Watt in standby.

Here’s a more meaningful measurement – the 3.3V supply ripple from an AA Board driving a JeeNode:

(No, I didn’t smash up the screen – the above image was doctored to remove some empty space.)

The other feature I want to highlight here is the logic analyzer option. Since I don’t have the logic probe yet, the only way to capture logic signals is via the analog scope channels – which luckily is supported just fine:

You’re looking at a short burst of SPI commands sent to an RFM12B. This is just SCK and MOSI, since I have only 2 analog probes to read this in with. The rest of the buffer is empty, since the bursts are sent only every 3 seconds.

Here again, the settings were adjusted to store as much as possible in sample memory. I found out by trial and error that the 2 ms/div setting was the maximum usable to reliably decode this 1 MHz SPI stream. The sampling rate is shown as 250 kSa/sec, which seems odds (4 µs resolution isn’t possibly enough to detect flanks in a 1 MHz signal). Maybe the hardware is playing tricks and storing 8 bits per byte? It’d explain the “20 MSa” value.

Then again, the top pane only displays 24 ms, and it appears to be the entire dataset. Which is 24,000 bits of decoded data @ 1 MHz, i.e. a couple of thousand bytes from the SPI stream. Enough for most purposes, especially since you can trigger on a specific serial bit pattern and then start capturing there (another add-on).

I’m not too concerned with ultra-deep logical analyzer storage. It’s easy to toggle an I/O pin in software where it gets interesting, and then trigger on that. There’s also a “B trigger” feature, as a way to cascade triggers.

Other supported protocols: UART, I2C, and parallel (requires the logic probe to acquire more signals).

This is not my own scope, BTW. I recently ordered another one from this series, but was given this unit on loan by Rohde & Schwarz (tops!) – it turns out that the scope is in short supply and has a delivery time of many weeks.

So much for gushing over an oscilloscope – geek stuff!