The Hameg HMO2024 scope just got a firmware upgrade – wow, it just keeps getting better and better.

Support for up to 6 calculated values (was 2), based on any of the input channels – now with optional statistics:

And one of the things I really missed dearly – the ability to see all decoded serial data in tabular form:

The top two traces show the SCL and SDA data in analog form, the next group is the color-coded serial data, and at the bottom is the list of packets. As you scroll through the table, the traces adjust to show the related information. Still shown at the bottom are the 6 auto-measured items I configured in the first screen.

Last big new feature is the capability to search through stored traces, again with a table to help navigation:

It’s all firmware, evidently, but I hadn’t expected the development to keep on moving the capabilities of this oscilloscope forward to such an extent. And these aren’t just gimmicks, such features can be extremely useful!

Oh boy, I’ve been bitten by the collector’s bug…

Couldn’t resist an excellent offer on Marktplaats (the Dutch equivalent of eBay) for a fully operational analog scope built in the late 70’s. The Tektronix 475 is, ehm… slightly larger than the Hameg HMO2024:

Then again, they are quite comparable – both are specified as 200 MHz bandwidth. Check ’em out:

The Tek will need to be re-calibrated, but as far as I can tell all the functions work and all the switches, knobs, and indicators are in good order. The previous owner said he had used it for a long time, but not intensively.

First thing I had to try was the analog clock, of course:

Apart from that? Oh, I don’t know. I’ll refurbish and re-calibrate it one day, there’s lots of info about this classic workhorse out on the web, and I really would like to learn how to diagnose and repair stuff. Even old stuff.

This is a single-beam unit, meaning it can’t show two signals at the same time. Newer and more advanced models are dual-beam, but this one has to either “alternate” between the two beam displays, or “chop” them up and draw bits of one and the other in an interleaved fashion. It’s also not a storage scope, so you’ve got to look very carefully if you want to see one-shot events – the display on the screen shows only as long as the phosphor glow lasts!

Fantastic engineering. Electronics, mechanical, operation, documentation, service – everything!

Would I have bought the Hameg if I’d had this one at the time? You bet – the “S” in DSO is a game changer, especially with microcontrollers and physical computing. But that huge Tek brick is more endearing :)

Heh, I’ve never before collected anything in my life – this is fun!

A while back, Jeroen mentioned on the forum that he had an ancient GM5655 Philips oscilloscope, and since he lives in Houten we thought it’d be fun to put it side-by-side with my new Hameg scope I keep generating screen shots with in this weblog (ad nauseam for some, I suspect…). Here’s his vintage 1955 hardware (from a web image) – just imagine how attractive that must have looked to geeks back then:

It’s single-channel unit, with a sweep generator which can go “all the way” up to 30,000 Hz. The horizontal deflection can also be driven externally, making this scope X-Y capable. Vertical sensitivity is up to 60 mV/cm, horizontal up to 100 mV/cm. No positioning, no magnification, nothing. This is as basic as a scope can be.

Jeroen dropped by a few days ago and we had a go at it. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get it to work. The horizontal deflection appears to be broken (not just the sweep generator, since it also didn’t respond to external signals). Most probably one or more of the “tar capacitors” has failed. It’s always them capacitors with old equipment…

Neither of us felt confident enough to go about messing with this thing while powered on (vacuum tubes, and especially the CRT, run on high voltage). But the least we could do is open it up and marvel at how things were constructed back then. No semiconductors and no printed circuit boards – pretty amazing, if you think about it.

It’s a pretty scruffy unit, once you open it up!

Note the big tar caps and the “flying” construction, especially around the rotary switches:

Here’s the other side, with what looks like just the vertical input circuit:

Here’s the top view, with 6 vacuum tubes in total:

The bottom view, with one more tube and what looks like a bunch of electrolytic power supply caps to me:

All this was manually assembled, so each unit had to be tested and debugged, since it wouldn’t take much to hook up things incorrectly. The invention of the printed circuit board not only creates a mechanical platform to hold everything in place (especially for low-voltage semiconductors), it also acts as a self-documenting area during assembly, since all the spots are already marked with what goes where.

Amazing stuff – I’m tempted to get a (somewhat more modern) analog scope off eBay, just for the fun of it :)

After having become reasonably familiar with the new Hameg HMO2024 oscilloscope, I wanted to find out just what its limits are. Came up with this screenshot:

There’s quite a bit of information in here.

First of all, these scopes can do double-rate sampling when you don’t activate all the channels. Channels 1 and 2 share some hardware, and so do 3 and 4, so by enabling only one of each block, the scope can actually double its sampling rate to 2 GSa/s i.s.o. 1 GSa/s and also “stack” its memory depth to 2 MB per channel, i.s.o. 1 MB. Or to put it another way: a 4-channel oscilloscope can be used as a 2-channel unit with twice the specs.

I switched the acquisition to display in “sample-and-hold” mode instead of the normal Sin X interpolation mode, so the steps shown above represent the real sampling that’s taking place. As you can see, there are 4 steps per division, with 2 ns/div, so that’s indeed 2 billion samples per second.

The top was zoomed out as far as I could while still showing the fastest supported 2 ns divisions in the detail window, which ends up being 50 µs/div. Running the scope timebase any slower will cause it to reduce its sample rate so it can still capture the required 12 horizontal divisions full of sampling data. In this case we see 12 x 50 µs = 600 µs of data on the screen, while the detail view is zoomed in to 2 GSa/s (25,000x).

That’s 1.2 million samples of data – a hefty pile of bits flying around in this thing while it’s running!

But there’s actually more, because of the stacked memory. When I pan across the 50 µs/div display, I can see that data was collected from 575 µs before the trigger point to 525 µs after the trigger point. Which is 1100 µs of collected data, IOW that’s 2.2 MB of acquired sample data – again, more than the specs in the brochure!

The vertical signal acquisition hardware is also very impressive. This is one of the few scopes I know of which will go down all the way to 1 mV per division. That’s real sampling, not some sort of digitally enhanced sensitivity, as you can see from the fact that the data steps really are 1 pixel in the vertical direction.

It might not seem important to go down that low, but it’s quite useful actually when measuring voltage drop over a shunt resistor. Which is what I’ve been doing quite a bit to display current usage of JeeNodes while in ultra low-power sleep. The other benefit is that you can still go down to 10 mV/div with the standard 1:10 probes that come with the scope (I’ve got a few 1:1/1:10 switchable no-brand probes for when I really need the extra sensitivity).

The red line is created by using the “Quick Math” function, subtracting the channel 3 signal from channel 1 in this case. The nice thing is that the math function supports 20x more magnification than the input channels. So with some trickery, this scope can display down to 50 µV/div: subtract a spare channel set to “GND” from the input signal, and magnify the resulting math output 20x. It’s a coarse (digital) way of magnifying the display, but still.

The actual data shown above is what the scope displays with no probe connected, BTW. This is the residual noise in the scope’s input circuitry and it really is impressively low-noise – just a quarter millivolt peak-to-peak.

At the other end of the range, the scope will go up to 10 V/div, i.e. 80V full scale. That’s ≈ 6 orders of magnitude of usable range on each channel. Wow… Hameg (and R&S) did some pretty serious engineering to achieve this.

PS. I’m ready to ditch my DSO-2090 USB scope – it’s unlikely that I’ll use it with this HMO2024 now at hand.

Update – same for the Logic Analyzer – a LAP-16032U, if you’re interested in it, let me know.

As it so happens, my scope finally arrived – and was immediately given a central place on the JeeLabs workbench:

It’s phenomenal. You’ve seen plenty of analog signal traces on this weblog recently, but this one includes a logic analyzer (up to 11 channels) and serial protocol decoding + triggering. Here’s an example with bi-directional SPI:

(these screenshots are slightly fuzzier than the real thing, because I had to resize the images to fit this weblog)

Light blue is the bus decoding, yellow is the analog SPI clock (with lots of over- and under-shoot), and purple is for the logic analyzer POD. Small gotcha: on a 4-channel scope, it’s either analog channel 3, or the 8-wide logic probe – never both at the same time. But on the plus side: if you only use 2 analog channels, then the scope can re-purpose the unused channels to double its max sample rate to 2 GSa/s, and its memory depth to 2 MB each.

That first photo shows the same SPI clock, BTW – it’s what 8 MHz on jumper wires + a breadboard looks like!

As it turns out, I ran into two problems while pushing the HMO722 unit loaned to me by Rohde & Schwarz. One of them was a mis-interpretation of the screen display on my side, while the other one uncovered a limitation of (only) the HMO722. In both cases, the support from R&S was very impressive: quick, knowledgeable, and best of all… effective. In this day and age, that’s exceptional – and laudable.

Here’s another capture, triggering in RS232 / UART mode on the character 0x1D, as decoded at 115.2 Kbaud on the TX line. You can see a small sketch upload (green) and the beginning of the verification read-back (yellow):

I’ve not seen this feature in low-end logic analyzers yet. It’s probably a separate FPGA, able to decode various protocols to generate the desired trigger signal, and – being an MSO – it also ties into analog acquisition.

Note that this can be done without logic probe. It was enabled here (the two purple lines) but it’s not essential, since serial protocol decoding + pattern-based triggering can also be performed with just the analog channels. The serial data single-shot storage limit is around 2.5 Kbyte (all data is sampled and stored as a bit stream).

One more thing I really love about this scope: it’s totally quiet (thank you Hameg, for following Apple’s lead!).

I can only repeat: this HMO series is the most modern in its class IMO and has an excellent price / performance ratio, with features matching some Tektronix and Agilent scopes at twice the price. If you don’t want to settle for a USB scope or one of the Rigol’s, then get the Hameg HMO724 (or one of the others, with a higher b/w front-end).

A scope is not for everyone, of course. And this one even less so, no doubt. Keep in mind that the landscape will be completely different again two years from now. So if you don’t plan to use it much, better hold on to your cash.

But if you do need a scope now, then I hope these last few posts can help you make up your mind…

PS. A comparison in German between the Hameg and Agilent scopes can be found here (written by Hameg).

This post continues where yesterday’s post leaves off, w.r.t. my adventures with oscilloscopes.

Last October, I decided to get a “real” scope. There were plenty of experiments (ongoing and planned), which would justify getting a new instrument for. Besides, Dave Jones’s review and teardown of in particular the Agilent InfiniiVision 3000 X series scopes got me completely drooling, while at the same time knowing I’d never be able to afford (let alone justify) buying such a high-end (for me!) oscilloscope.

The most popular unit by far probably, is the Rigol 1052E and its cousin the 1052D with logic analyzer. The former is called a “DSO” (Digital Storage Oscilloscope), while the latter is a more recent trend called the “MSO” (Mixed Signal Oscilloscope). The market price for these two seems to be around €400 and €900, respectively.

MSO’s are more pricey than DSO’s, and in a way it’s not easy to justify the price difference, particularly if you consider that USB-connected Logic Analyzers such as the ZeroPlus and Openbench Logic Sniffer can be had for a fraction of that price difference. My main reason for exploring MSO’s can be summarized in one word: knobs.

But before I explain, let me describe the Rigol scope and how it worked out for me.

As it so happened, a good friend was willing to lend me his Rigol DS5062CA, which appears to be the predecessor of the DS1052E. It’s very similar, in looks and in functionality:

The specs of this scope are actually really good: 60 MHz bandwidth and a whopping 1 GSa/s sample rate. This means you really will get more than enough samples to get a very accurate view of a 60 MHz sine wave on screen, and probably also of a 5 .. 10 MHz square wave.

If you’ve been following this weblog in October and November, then you’ll have seen dozens of blue screen shots in the various posts, all taken from this Rigol scope (using a camera, as this unit has no front-side USB).

Since I really wanted to learn as much as I could about a scope like this, I spent a lot of time exploring all its features, including signal filtering, trigger delays, zooming in, measurements, cursors, maths, all the way to FFT. My first conclusion has to be that there is an incredible amount of functionality in such an instrument. This little unit is a perfect example of what sets a DSO apart from classical analog scopes. It’s a different ball game.

But the second unexpected outcome of this learning process, is that it convinced me completely that “knobs” are dramatically more convenient than any computer-based emulation using keyboard and mouse. Within a few weeks, motor memory sets in: you intuitively push the right buttons and turn the right knobs, while analyzing a signal and looking for the best way to visualize it. You can keep your eyes on the screen and on the circuit, while resting one hand on the controls and adjusting things. I’ll never go back to a USB-connected solution.

So the search was on – a scope, preferably with a built-in logic analyzer.

I had already figured out two things: 1) scope prices are unbounded, and 2) I’ll buy one once, and never again. This insight was an agonizing one: I knew I was going to spend way more money than I was comfortable with (for both reasons #1 and #2) and I also knew I’d be stuck with my choice forever, for better or for worse.

I’ll spare you all my deliberations. Everyone will attach a different weight to different aspects. In my case, I did want a “better than 320×240 display” and a bandwidth of ≥ 100 MHz, to cater for (vague) future needs.

As already documented on this weblog, I ended up going for the Hameg HMO722 .. HMO2024 series, now produced by Rohde & Schwarz. The bandwidths run from 70 to 200 MHz, as 2- or 4-channel units. Here’s the HMO722, on loan from R&S until my unit arrives:

It’s interesting how the controls are organized slightly differently from the Rigol, and how relatively long it took me (already!) to re-learn and re-internalize the placement and menu structure. As with a photo camera, you really have to go in the deep end and completely familiarize yourself with all the different corners of the equipment to the point that – after that – you can fully focus on the experiment, the circuit, and its signals.

My conclusion? I’m very happy with this choice, and I’m not saying this to mask any form of buyer’s remorse – there is none. I ended up going for the high-end model: 200 MHz, 4-channel. And I’d do it again tomorrow.

So what would you do, if you’re considering getting a scope? Here are my – unsolicited – suggestions:

• budget €100 – don’t get anything and don’t worry too much – you can have lots if fun without one
• budget €250 – get something like a DSO-2090: 2-channel, very decent software – or check out this list
• budget €400 – get the Rigol DS1052E, it’s popular and it’ll give you the most bang for the buck, IMO
• budget €900 – get either a Rigol DS1052D, or a DS1102E w/ separate logic analyzer (such as the OLS)
• budget €1700 – get the Hameg HMO724, superb features, can also act as 4-channel logic analyzer
• budget €2600 – get the Hameg HMO2022 w/ options, or the HMO2024 (which is what I chose)
• budget €4000 – don’t despair, there’s one just right for you too (there are no doubt newer lists)
• budget €7000 – go for it, get that 4-channel 350+ MHz Agilent 3000-X series MSO, with lots of options

If I had to pare the list down further, I’d make it a choice between the Rigol DS1052E and the Hameg HMO724.

Stay tuned for the last part of this series, tomorrow.

(Note – a better title would probably have been: “How I picked an oscilloscope”, since YMMV!)

Oscilloscopes are the “printf” of the electronics world. Without a “scope” you can only predict and deduce what’s happening in a circuit, not actually verify (let alone “see”) it. Here’s what an oscilloscope does: on the vertical axis, you see what happens, on the horizontal axis you see when it happens. It’s a voltmeter plus a time-machine.

Most modern oscilloscopes are digital. One advantage is that they can store the observation, long enough for us sluggish humans to look at the captured signal and ponder about it. For things which happen only rarely, that is crucial. But even when you’re examining things that are periodic, like the shape of a waveform, the scope gives you time to think regardless of the time scale of the event.

If you’re into soldering, then you really need at least one multimeter. Any one will do, even the cheapest one. If you’re into electronics, to the point of trying out new circuits, then you should consider getting an oscilloscope. And lastly, if you’re into pushing limits of any kind with these circuits, then you must have an oscilloscope. Let me add for completeness, that if you are only working with digital chips, interconnecting them in your projects but not really operating at the upper range, then you might want to get a Logic Analyzer first. A logic analyzer is similar to a scope, but only cares about (multiple) 0/1 signals, not actual voltage levels – their analog input circuitry is simpler than scopes, but they usually need to sample over much longer periods of time to be useful.

In this 3-part post, I’ll describe how I started out and where I ended up, with also a bit of “why” thrown in.

My first purchase, 3 months after I started with JeeLabs, was a DSO-2090 USB oscilloscope front end for a PC:

It samples at 100 MSa/s and is quoted as having a 40 MHz bandwidth. Realistically, these figures tell me that it’ll give a good view of sine waves up to 20 MHz, and square waves up to say 3 .. 5 MHz. It cost me €239 at Conrad.

Such a “USB scope” does all the analog stuff in the box, and then pushes the digitized data over USB to the host PC to do the rest of the work, including presenting an oscilloscope-like display on the screen. The DSO-2090’s software is fairly good (Windows-only, not very convenient for me).

First off, let me say that I’ve got over 2 years of excellent mileage out of this thing. It’s 100x better than no scope.

The limitations I ran into were as follows:

• It’s tied to USB, and hence needs to be close to the computer or notebook. This wasn’t always convenient for me. A second aspect is that the whole thing is not “galvanically isolated” – signal ground is USB ground. For my recent 230V AC mains experiments, that simply wasn’t practical anymore.
• Emulating a scope on screen, while tempting due to the available screen real-estate, is not as great as I had thought. It’s downright tedious to rotate a knob on-screen using a mouse, and if you don’t, then you have to figure out a bunch of keyboard shortcuts (and remember them next time around!).

Which led me to get this tiny unit as add-on – a DSO Nano (v1), sized and shaped a bit like a mobile phone:

At US$ 90 from SeeedStudio, I didn’t expect this 1-channel 1 MSa/s scope to replace my DSO-2090, it was more a way to get a very portable unit, and a convenient little box on the desktop.

The DSO Nano trades screen size (dropping back to 320×240) for battery-powered unthethered operation. There are now more capable (and more pricey) models with 2 analog channels.

It’s a neat little box, but I underestimated the fact that the controls are even more limiting, and that a 1-channel unit very much reduces the number of things you can do with it. It’s probably fine for audio work, but with a scope, capturing the right signals at the right time is crucial, and a 1-channel unit doesn’t offer many options for triggering. In the end, I decided that the unit was not for me, and have since re-sold it.

Two years pass…

Yes, it actually took me about two years to realize that I wasn’t getting nearly as much out of my DSO-2090 as I ought to. I had also bought a Logic Analyzer around the same time (a ZeroPlus LAP-16032U), but it too was mostly sitting on the shelf collecting dust, again because having a USB device with Windows software connected to my Mac in the wrong place wasn’t truly convenient.

Last October, I decided that it was time for a change – stay tuned for the rest of this story in tomorrow’s post.

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!

While exploring the different ways to get to grips with the 50 Hz AC signal, I stumbled on video about oScope, an app for iPad and iPhone. It’s just €3.99, and samples with 16 bit @ 48 KHz.

It works via the audio input, which is a decent A/D converter for signals in the audio range. The neat bit is that it can also get its input via a USB audio adapter hooked up using the iPad’s camera adapter kit. And I happened to have all the required bits lying around:

Woohoo – instant scope!

The horizontal and vertical are set with pinch-and-zoom, and the scale displays in the top left corner. Likewise, setting the trigger you just drag the red trigger line up or down.

Here’s a screen shot:

(it doesn’t quite come out at reduced size, but on-screen it’s gorgeous)

There’s also what appears to be an FFT power spectrum:

There’s also a (more expensive) app from ONYX Apps which can sample both audio channels and has a convenient auto-set mode (but no FFT):

The problem I have with all this is that the noise in my signal is gone. These samples were taken from the same 0.1 Ω shunt setup as in the previous days, so I’m not quite sure why the amplitude is different and why the signal is so noise-free. Perhaps there is some signal processing going in in the iPad.

But a real scope based on touch screen controls and such a large display sure would be phenomenal!