Hi, we're going to take a look at the 01 SDS series oscilloscopes or smart Digital storage scope. This isn't going to be a full review unfortunately. Um I've just got this uh uh, 93 D SDS 932 scope for a very short amount of time. So thanks to Charles at Trio Smartcow who loan me this one um and I we we'll take a quick look at it.

So I've like just turned it on I'm just going to play around with it. So this is like more of a first Impressions video once again than a full review. So please forgive me if I miss anything. I'm sure I will or I get something wrong.

it'll no doubt people will correct me. It's worth taking a look at the box that comes in it did. It looks rather uh, quite neat. but uh, check this out.

Smart design to offer easy workplace smart function to offer effective operate. Please read that in a Chinese accent and uh on the front here. we've got bandwidth 60 MHz to 300 MHz Well this is the model I've got the 300 MHz model here. um I don't know if it's the same front end or anything like that.

Um I assume it is um 10 Meg record length um 8 in uh screen. One of the big selling points: 800x 600 screen full color of course Unique function Auto Scale You got to be kidding me. Battery backup? What? No, this thing is actually uh well, it can be battery powered. There's an optional Uh slot on the bottom which you can sliding a battery pack for this thing.

So I guess that's one of the uh, big um selling points of this thing is that it is a battery or can be a battery powered scope. I Have no idea um, how long it lasts or anything like that. I Think the battery is about $60 or so it doesn't come standard with it. And this model of course is the SDS 9302 300 MHz bandwidth.

So if you're after bandwidth really cheap, um then this might be a way to get it. um, and a very impressive sound in 3.2 2 gig samples per second. So as far as a sample rate and bandwidth go, this thing for $1,500 um for a 300 MHz bandwidth scope. Not bad at all.

So this is the topof the range unit 1500 Smackers! Now the first thing you notice when you take this thing out of the box is just how thin it is I Mean that is just ridiculous. Check out the depth of this. Absolutely incredible. And on top of that, it's actually uh, concave It actually.

uh yeah, you can just get that on camera. It actually caves in like that. Absolutely amazing. Small and lightweight.

Doesn't weigh much at all. 1.78 kilos in fact, minus the battery. so on the back. uh, not much at all really.

There's just a uh, trigger output and pass fail output. so we should be able to measure the update rate of this thing. Um, a lot of goodness on the side here. uh Lan standard VGA standard and USB uh host and device as well.

Very good. I'm not sure if it's entirely standard, but I think most suppliers are actually offering it with the Lan and the external VGA option as well. so that's excellent. And on the other side, we have I main input with a real clunking power switch there.

So this power switch here on the top feels like a real clunking power switch. but it's not. It's actually a standby switch. And of course, when it's in standby, the standby lead comes on up there and we can power the thing on.

and uh, the screen on it is uh, very very nice by the way. very very bright. Um, it's hard to sort of get the brightness of uh, these screens on camera get it properly and the viewing angle down like it's You lose it at about 45, you lose the graticule there at about 45, but you can still see it. It's not bad from the side, it's not too bad at all from the top.

Yeah, Works A treat. So viewing angle not bad. So the screen is pretty darn good. 800x 600? um I don't know whether or not they it doesn't look like they do any pixel uh, doubling at all on that.

Now of course most of the time if you use it, um, just on a regular workbench level like this, you sort of don't want it, sit in vertical like that so you can actually flip out these feet here and that puts it on quite a substantial uh, angle then like that. and but look at this, these buttons. One of the problems is the buttons are very tight and I can push that all the way over with without actually pushing that button. So really, you know you should sort of put your fingers on there when you push the button like that.

and product design fail. The buttons are just far too stiff, of course. I can actually using the right technique. You can actually get to push them without pushing the thing over of course.

but even on this rubber surface which has a bit of grip cuz it's got rubber, some rubber feed on it I can actually I am able to actually push that scope around like that if you're like, uh, working on a slipperier, uh, workbench like an office desk or something. Forget it. This thing is just going to slide everywhere. So in that respect, hopeless.

And yes, there is a fan in there. Yeah, it's reasonably noisy. bit of a were in there, so it's certainly not the quietest thing I've ever heard. Little bit distracting.

I've got nothing else on here. can definitely hear it now in terms of build quality and and feel. You take it out of the box and you think, oh, it's it's okay, but you can't um, help but think it's you know it's a bit of a toy. It's built down to a price.

The Plastics aren't that great of quality. The button feel as I said, far too uh, tight. You know the the color scheme and all that sort of thing. Very Bland Um, the controls don't feel very good.

uh at all. These don't have the Um encoder knobs here. The rotor encoders they've got. you know, very poor feel to them.

There's no indents in there. The uh volt per division does have um indents in them. They they do feel a bit better, but these other ones I don't know. don't Not a real fan of the look and feel of this thing at all.

Um, the good news is is that yes, all the buttons are pushable. They do have that secondary uh function. So excellent. And they've gone for the five uh, soft functions on the side here as well as menu off.

Great. You know, if you don't want the menu to buger off please. And even the feel of that button is very cheap. Tactile of these buttons.

Very cheap tactile, uh type feel. really don't like it at all. and uh, they've decided to go for another five down here. but they're not spread out like the usual thing right along the base of that screen.

They've uh, decided to dedicate um, a user part of the screen for us, your user measurements and stuff like that. and yes, it does show your current sample rate and your memory depth all the time. I Love that! Brilliant shows. Your trigger level shows your um, horizontal, uh, sweep speed, shows your vertical over here and then some user stuff over here so you know it's It's not bad, but it's just interesting to note that it's sort of only using you know, just over half of the bottom of the uh screen there.

One of the most annoying aspects of this thing though is that you have to just jump all over the shop. Check this out If I go up to the acquire menu. Okay, well here's the acquisition mode. So you're going to go from here all the way down to here acquisition mode and then you got to go up to this side one over here.

I mean you can't just sort of, you know, cycle through those by just pressing that button again. It's not like it's a, you know, a popup menu or anything like that and and do that so you just always. every time you seem to use this thing even though I've only been using it for a short amount of time, you just got to jump all over the place and it gets really annoying. They just haven't put thought into the you know, usability and the ergonomics of this thing.

but I don't mind, uh, the actual uh control layout itself. It's reasonably, uh, quite good. The separate vertical for each Channel and they're lined up directly on the BNC. They are colorcoded to match the screen.

so or well, kind of. they're kind of gone red. Um, these don't light up the Run Stop button up here. Yeah, it does light up.

It's much brighter when it's red, but green is pretty darn wimpy and there is a single shot button. lights up white. I mean it's just no. I mean just really poor choices there.

and all this dark gray and the stick on um, silk screened overlay like it. just. it just appears a bit, uh, cheapish to me. but anyway, uh yeah.

the triggers, uh lined up here. the horizontals here. what? I Always prefer a bigger horizontal uh knob of course, but you know that's just from the uh, old analog days. and uh, they've got all your utility and uh, menu buttons up here as as well as your multipurpose uh, function button so you know it's all there.

it's You know it's reasonably well laid out. I Have no idea what that is down there. It's almost like it's a little infrared. uh, remote control window or something.

I don't know. I Haven't read the menu so I've got no clue. One thing to note about the screen here. You notice on either side here they've got half a look.

half a division. So they got 14 divisions and well, they've got like 15 total. But it's you know it's only half a division. on the side.

I Not sure if I've ever seen that before. Um I You know I Don't know why did they do that, but hey, the more waveform the better right? So I guess you can't complain. Now on the vertical, I'm at 5 MTS per division. it does go down to 2 m volts per division.

but check this out. Full bandwidth limit at the moment. Of course you can select full bandwidth or 20 MHz here and uh, but if we go down to Oh wrong way, if we go down to 2 MTS per division automatically turns the bandwidth limit on there. I Like that, it tells you down there, it's really quite nice.

and there it is. Bandwidth limit automatically on. So at that lowest 2 M setting, you don't get your 300 MHz bandwidth. So yeah, your 1500 bucks has gone to waste there.

Now here's an interesting thing to note: Notice that we're in the center at the moment and yes, we can, um, change our position down there. It's a little bit slow, but you know it does overshoot a little bit. but uh, to your actual uh, movement, you see it, see it jump up Vom and then jump back down there. But anyway, um, that's not too bad and you can just press it to go back to the center.

Excellent. Love that and it tells you your offset down there, which is really quite nice. I Don't like how it says like double negative down there, negative negative anyway. Um, what I want to show you is that uh, when you invert it like this, yes, there's a there's a DC um offset in there and that's not uncommon.

You know all Scopes are going to have this right down. at the bottom end, we're at 2 MTS per Division and if you turn it up, then you expect that to go down of course. and it does. So say, at 10 ms per division, we can still see a significant offset down there.

Now if we go up to 100, you'll hear a relay click. There we go. Um, that just, uh, switched to the other range and you notice that look, it's now got another level of offset in there at 100 MTS per division. So that's actually quite significant offset.

Now normally you can, um, uh, calibrate this thing and compensate for this in uh, software by running a calibration routine. but I haven't been able to find that yet. If I go into the utility menu. Here's another thing, right.

You go into the there's the utility button over here. you click it and like you, you think there's nothing here like you think there's no options. You know, hardly anything at all. You think it's just the output.

you pop that up and then we've got this menu that comes up over here instead over here now. Oh, you can set that. uh Timeout on the menu thing. then we use our multi-purpose uh knob here and then we can go into config display adjust pass, fail, our output type and our land setting.

So our output uh type for example output type is that pass fail and uh trig level and then all of our past fail stuff and then it comes back down here. Now instead of over here it's like it's all over the shop. It really is. It's uh, it's terrible but you call that up and you can adjust a self cow.

Here we go here we go I missed that before there you go so maybe we can calibrate that out. Let me run it. Remove all probes, blah blah blah Press any key to quit press H2 from Channel One press H2 what's H2 what's H2 oh do didn't see it H2 horizontal soft key number two down here. Oh goodness there we go Auto calibration What? I did press H2 for calibration? There we go.

it's calibrating. so now hopefully it'll take out all those DC offsets. He's taking its fat time. Let me tell you all right, it's done.

Took a few minutes there. let's have a look at the uh no look at that. There we go. It's fixed all the offset.

Oh there's something jumping around there. Look at that. Uh yep, yeah, not a problem. Excellent, well done.

Now if we go over here into the trigger menu, call it up. Um, once again, it's a little bit convoluted. We've got like um, you think, oh yeah, look like type here and then this has popped up over here again. So we use our multi purpose knob here to choose our type.

So we' got Edge video, slope and pulse and then you can just push that uh, use that button to push that in and then it's popped up down here again. It's ah man. Anyway, if we go up here to Edge some people might be pleased to know Yes, it does have true alternate uh trigger So it can trigger from both Channel one and Channel two and you'll notice the trigger point down here. if I adjust the trigger level, you can see that change changes on the screen of course gives you your little uh Diamond over there fix vanishes.

That all works as you'd expect on any, uh, modern scope and you see the level always. But if you uh, go down here to um, alternate Bingo we've got a second trigger level over here for the second. Channel Brilliant. You'll notice that we can change the source there channel two and now we're able to move these two independent trigger points for Channel 1 and Channel 2.

Fantastic! Um, you know a lot of Scopes even like the Agant scopes for example, you know you can pay $10,000 for a scope and not get this alternate uh trigger functionality. So if you're really need this for some particular purpose, this scope has it. But of course, the reason that some uh, modern a lot of modern Scopes don't have this alternate trigger. It's actually fairly rare to uh, find sort of.

You know, most scopes of Ryal and the agilant ones like that don't actually um, have this capability because it actually um, in terms of uh, designing the chipset for the scope and stuff like that, the acquisition engine, and that sort of stuff. it just makes it more difficult and then it impacts um, you know your in terms of like, your update rates per second and the high performance nature of the scope and all that sort of thing. So um, so a lot of modern Scopes Uh, skip it. but this is not a high performance uh High update rate scope so they can just whack that in there.

Not a problem. One feature lacking though is that it only um selects positive or negative. um edge here. it doesn't actually have both so you can't uh uh, you know, trigger off um either slope like that so that's really quite annoying.

Um, hold off down here. Of course we have our hold off auto normal single. all your basic stuff apart from that, you know, hasn't got anything uh, too fancy. There's no Um I squar C uh, triggering SPI or any logic analysis, uh, triggering or anything like that.

It's not even an option, so uh, forget it if you're looking to do a digital troubleshooting because you could with them, you know, very large 10 Meg sample memory in here. it'll be. you know, ideal for uh, you know, decoding packets and stuff like that. But no, forget it.

Um, doesn't have that capability whatsoever. Pulse trigger down here. We've got some other stuff. so as with most modern Scopes, it does have that ability to, um, you know, trigger off pulse widths and uh, stuff like that.

So yeah, triggering. It's got all your basic capability when your slope triggering here though. Check this out. Um, we've got slew rate triggering so you can trigger off a particular slew rate.

Very nice. One interesting thing to note I'm not sure if you can see it, but it just you know thing that highlights the cheapness in this thing is you can actually see down through this foot. here. this pop out foot, you can actually see the PCB down in there.

I can see a connector and if I really wanted to with that Mains plugged in I could stick a screwdriver in there and probably touch some of the Main's input circuitry and Darwin's going to get you. If you're you know, stick, stick your screwdriver in there with the mains plugged in and all that sort of stuff. but it just you know. it just goes to show that it's H I don't know, you know.

and given the weight of this thing, there's not much shielding in there at all. Um, sorry and you can see the Uh PCB down in there as well. it's probably not going to show up great on camera, but trust me, you can see Parts down in there and sorry no I'm uh, not going to be able to take this uh thing apart cuz this is a stock scope so it's got to I've got to keep the uh uh screen protector on and it's got to go back in the box back for sale. And one thing with the trigger option.

by the way, the source down here. Channel One Channel 2 external external divided 5 AC line. but there's no like a math trigger option or anything like that. Now an interesting thing.

I can't figure out what the pushable aspect of the vertical volts per division control here, it doesn't seem to do anything at all. It like usually that will put you into a fine mode, but as you can see there is no fine mark mode. It's just your usual 125 uh sequence so there is. There's no way to get a fine verer on that.

and there doesn't seem to be a menu option either. Unbelievable. and that appears to be the same thing with the horizontal here over over here as well. Like you go into main, you press your horizontal menu.

we've got main, we've got set which what is that? That's a window and then we can zoom the window. Oh I don't like that. we'll get on to that. But anyway.

um, you press that and you'd expect to be able to get a fine verer control of your horizontal time base. but you can't This: these are pushable, but they don't do anything. Maybe I should read the bloody manual but I don't know. crazy.

let's feed a signal up. Its clacky here. We've got a 100% modulated uh sine wave 1 MHz carrier. You've seen me use this uh before with a 1 khz modulation and of course.

um, you know most Scopes won't actually trigger on that. you've got to set a delay. So we'll go. We'll go into the trigger down here, we'll go hold off and I'll hold off at uh, what? are we? 200 microc per division? we need like 500 uh, micros, um, offset or thereabouts? I need to change the 600 NS so we go up to a couple of 100.

It doesn't seem to have any velocity uh, controls by the way. So uh, that's a bit of a downside, but here we go, we should see it lock in. Very short. Hello! McFly There we go.

Bingo Now what we need to do is check out the acquisition menu here and acquisition mode. Okay, you've got uh, sample, uh rate you've got. uh Peak detect Of course. don't mind that it's giving you the peak uh envelope, but a lot of people won't.

Uh, like that they'll want to see their proper uh waveform of screen timeout and it's got an average mode. Of course there we go. 64 averages. You can change that over there.

Bingo. Not a problem, but uh, there we go and our memory length of course can go up to 10. Meg uh 1 Meg 100K 10K and 1K So let's do our press our Auto set button over here dreaded Auto set button and uh, see what it can do with this waveform? Um I Yeah, that's exactly what I expected most. Scopes Um, won't actually do that.

hasn't changed memory depth at all. Now of course this thing, um, it doesn't have any anti- Alis in it's an absolute dog. Check this out. Bingo We eventually get down to crap like that and of course that even that's with 100K memory depth.

Watch this. Okay, here's a trap for young players: I might do a separate video on this now. let's say you wanted the fastest screen updating rate I Mean it's not very fast at the moment with 100K memory depth? let's go into our choir. button up here and we're going to our sample.

memory length 10K We're still seeing way. it's getting some wobbly business. Not sure what's going on there, that's it's wobbly so it's sort of starting to Alias there even when it's got it on the screen. Oh I Don't don't like that at all.

That's like jell mode, but look, you put on a th000 and you've you've just gone. Okay, so let's say you've got your 100K depth here. You can go all the way out to there and you'll see when I switch to now lower it. We're still getting our waveform there.

Oh, we just okay. we just got in. that's the jello mode, but let's go back into length and you'll probably find it'll Alias now with 10K Yeah, there we go. Look at that trap for young players.

So basically what's going on there is the lower your memory depth, the quicker you're going to Alias a signal like that. So just be very, very careful when you're using this thing. Um, it doesn't have an auto memory depth feature like for example like the Agilant has. So which basically doesn't allow you to fall into this trap.

but this scope not you really got to know what you're doing. Look right? I set my memory depth to 10 Meg right? So we can see all that lovely juicy stuff now and we're not getting any of that. There's a little bit of something happening there, but basically no, there's no har on that at all. That's uh, that's well, that's pretty good.

and one Meg and you go down to 100K and we start to see some wobbly business. look at that jellow mode I call it like a trademark. that and of course there is no intense graded display. If you want an analog like scope, you're buying the wrong scope cuz the waveform updates on this um, feel very very sluggish.

We'll be able to measure that Uh, shortly. I think and um, no, there's no intensity graded display. In fact I can't even find a simple way to actually change that. Anyway, let's now change dot mode.

Look at this. What a heap of crap, right? In fact, we're on. Well, we're 10K memory depth. so maybe the memory depth has something to do with it.

but you expect to see dots. Where the hell are my dots I Want my damn dots? look Vector Mode Vector Mode's fine, you know, not a problem. Yeah, it's got. um, it's got persistence.

Very limited persistence mode. by the way. look at that. you can get 1 second persistence.

So the persistence Mode's actually not bad. I should show that you can see it does actually do variable intensity persistence so it fades it out. So there's a Decay uh function built into the persistence there. So it kind of does give an analog like display in that respect when you have the persistence in there.

But don't fall into the Trap of thinking once again, the jumping menus jumping all over the place. It's crazy. Don't fall into the Trap of thinking that, um, you know this thing actually has analog like you know VPO DPO Typ Art technology. It certainly doesn't.

And check out this, folks in variable persistence mode. Look at this There's bugs, right? I've stopped it. So we've gone into stop mode here. Okay, I just captured that waveform we got 10K memory depth and look with this persistence on.

Look. Look at this right. It comes good there. but you sort of change this.

um. horizontal control too quick. and it seems to come up with these artifacts like it's all over the shop. It's unbel, Look horrible.

Absolutely horrible. And of course there's our 10K memory depth limitation and this thing has. Even though you're in Vector mode, it has this weird feature I've noticed of. um, when you go down to the lower setting of where you know you get down to a certain point and it will not vectorize that anymore.

can see a point there? You probably can't see that, but there's a point there. Point there. point there, point there. So it's gone to dot mode effectively even though it hasn't like, it's still Vector mode.

but it won't draw those vectors in. So that's like this is dumb. Don't know what's going on there. It's crazy.

Anyway, if we, uh, change our acquisition length here and let's go up to the big monster. Hello, hello. What? You can't change? You can't change your memory depth when you're in stop mode. I presume that's what that is.

Yeah, it Grays it out when you're in stop mode. Unbelievable. All right there we go. Let's uh, stop that and see if we can.

Yeah, look, see, we get this. There's that. sort of it's we. sort of get that variable persistence.

um Decay intensity graded I won't use the term intensity grer cuz it's not correct. But look, there's this artifact I can get multiple W forms up here. Watch this. look, look, look at that.

What the hell is that Got to be me? So this thing really does seem to have some uh bugs in its. um, you know, stop uh display engine I Really don't like it and well I'm not sure what version of firmware I'm running it doesn't matter. look oh there we go. No yeah.

So we got. oh, that's our that's our. Decay There we go. we can see some of the variable persistence.

Let me turn that off. Now here's an interesting feature. It's got trigger frequency. you can turn that on, but uh, trust me folks, that trigger frequency.

It's currently showing 261 khz and uh, trust me, that ain't the waveform update rate. Not for a second. And there's the uh VGA onoff uh thing. By the way, it doesn't seem to blank the screen or anything I think it just turns the external monitor off and on.

So I've turned that uh persistence mode off now. We got maximum 10 Meg memory depth and uh I can't fault it now. so there's a bit of lag on that horizontal zoom button. some I think it s sort of Skips or misses some of the uh, some of the rotation there.

so I don't think the encoder in there is that uh, is that great or the or the software reading the encoder is that great. But anyway, that bug only seems to be there in uh in persistence mode and it has not only an auto set button but an auto scale button Now I've pressed I just pressed that auto scale button. Listen to those relays, it just continually Cycles through the relays. it'll do that forever.

It's not going to settle there and a is just uh popped up there for auto scale but it's just it's just jumping all over the shop and there's nothing to tell you that you're still in. Oh well, no, sorry. down here. off there it is.

Turn the bloody thing off and uh ah, it's just ah so you can Auto scale horizontal and vertical just like those little cheap little handheld pocket. Scapes no I don't like it at all. garbage. Now as far as the uh horizontal Zoom goes, it's pretty darn awkward.

You call up horizontal menu down here and you can. You got your main time base here which is M for main time base 2 micros per division. you can in the set mode. Then we can adjust the size of our window down there so we should be able to zoom in on that and then we can zoom in on that waveform, but you can't show both at once.

It's just a man. it's so 1990s smart digital scope my ass. And of course, the real problem with that is um, yeah, you've now got your two waveforms on there. but once you bugger off out of that, you don't know which one it's uh, using.

You've got to like assume that you know you've got to see that and know that you're using that window time base instead of the main time base down there. So I guess once you know. sort of obvious, but if you start using the scope uh, for the first time, it's just no. it's just awful.

It really is. Now let's go into our measure menu and have a look at that. and of course you can add them down here. I've already got like the rise time down there and it does seem to be fairly comprehensive, but you got to go down here.

You got to go up here. You got to press that. and then yeah, we got a whole bunch. Uh, period.

Frequency mean: Peak to Peak cycle RMS blah blah blah V stop overshoot rise time for four time negative duty cycle delay so you know it's reasonably, uh, comprehensive. I Don't mind that at all. So let's choose Peak to Peak there and we've got a oh no. See it.

Just add there we go. We just added our V Peak what? VP it's V Peak to Peak it should be VP P Peak to Peak You know what that is. it's not Peak and we'll use the show button. Tada there it is.

One of the interesting things is that uh, you can add more than what it looks like there. It looks like you could already add four before, but I added one there and it shifted it up. so I can keep adding items in there and it'll keep shifting that display up. I'll show you.

looks like we can only have a maximum of eight there. Let's look at the waveform update rate and yes, you are reading that correctly folks. 35 Hertz 35 waveform updates per second Of course I'm using my Um Agilant frequency counter to measure the uh trigger out uh function of this thing and that's truly what we get in. and no, that is the smallest memory depth 1,000 I Kid you not, let's change it to 10K memory depth 100K It really.

you know it changes a bit, but it's basically effectively independent of the Uh memory depth so the memory depth is is useless. Why offer a th000 sample memory depth if you're not going to get faster waveform updating? It's Madness and you can actually see it on the on the screen. There, you know the waveform update rate is basically the same. It's it's just crazy.

Give me a break and no, it really doesn't make a difference. Um, what time base I Uh, use either. like like I Haven't been able to crack 40 wave form updates per second yet. Is this like the slowest scope on the market? It's got to be now.

I've got another way to uh, demonstrate that to you using the scope itself. I'm effectively feeding it up its own clacker here. I'm taking the Uh trigger output here, feeding that into Channel 2 and I'm using the Uh alternate trigger capability to, um, allow us to measure the frequency on Channel 2. there's our input frequency 1 MHz that we're feeding in the channel one that we're measuring and there's our rate.

There it is again, 35 Hertz So this is actually quite a a neat Uh feature. this. um, it can actually display the frequency of your second, your alternate trigger. Really quite nice.

So it's actually able to measure itself in that respect. So this seems to be the true update rate unless there's something actually fundamentally wrong with the trigger output on this thing. and it's sort of I don't know. not updating properly.

but yeah, there it is. 35 htz. And if we go in there, um, and we change our length, there it is. 10K There we go.

So 1K there we go. we get 25. We're getting 35. Before there we go.

when the menu's on, it's slower. Look at that. let me see if I can do that again. Let's let's do the acquire menu length so it looks like all that processing.

Yeah, look look I Press the hang on. Watch this right. I'll press the acquire button and watch that it'll drop right. It's nice and stable at the moment.

35 HZ Watch it drop. I'll press it. no. Well look.

I'll press measure. maybe look. It jumped down to 28 now. I Press Acquire because it's got to update the screen.

That's that's just ridiculous. Utility menu anyway. I I swear it drops there. I'm not sure if I'm able to capture that.

but anyway. look. you call up the length menu and look. it's got a display more on the screen.

So the frame the um update speed is dropping. Look, it drops down to 25. It drops by 10. I Mean, as if it wasn't already, the world's slowest.

Scope When you turn on the bloody menu, it gets even slower. That is shocking. Absolutely shocking. I Don't think I've ever seen a scope this bad.

The Good: New: You want to know what the good news is. Well, the good news is that. um, it doesn't matter what, uh, memory depth you operate at, you're going to get the same waveform update rate. So hey, you may as well run 10 Meg all the time.

Smart my ass for the Americans there. Check this out. There's something wrong with the alternate trigger level. There it is the yellow marker, right? So it's triggering.

You know, in fact, it doesn't even look like it's triggering it like it should be in the center, right? That should be in the center marker. but it's not. It's like moved over right. So that's wrong.

And then of course, if I change my trigger level. look, the waveform moves as you'd expect, right? And if you drop off the bottom, look, it's still going. But look, look, Watch this. We go up and up and up and up.

and whoa. Away she goes. Look at that. Got to be kidding me.

Come on. Why does it only work that half there? It's just garbage. Something seriously wrong with this. Okay, let's try the waveform capture mode.

I've plugged in a USB stick on the side here. Let's press the uh copy button and hey, there we go. It pops up with a um, a keyboard. How the hell do you use the keyboard? Where the hell is the enter key? Uh oh look yeah, we can use our multifunction button to scroll all the way around there and oh man, that is.

Dicky But you press the center. uh I pressed it I Pressed my multifunction knob there. I Did I swear? Or you got to use the copy button. Do you? Is that the enter button? Maybe you would think that the you you scroll around with this thing.

No, it's doing something. Now it's now, it's locked up. Or is it actually taking that long to save the file? Oh man, are you kidding me? No, there's nothing here. There's nothing on those menus.

What? What? What? What a heap of garbage. Oh hello. McFly ah Ah, just what a heap of crap. This thing just disappoints me at every turn.

It really does all right. Little bit of an unfair uh test here. Comparing this, um, real, uh, cheap 0 On to the uh, a little bit more up. Market Riol uh, 2000 series here.

but what I've got is I've got a lroy uh demo board which can generate a little run pulse here. It's uh, there we go. I can switch it off off, then on and you can see that the Ryar is capturing that. No problems, but this has got 50,000 waveform updates per second.

uh, maximum depending on uh, the exact time base you use and all sorts of things. And you see, of course, we're not picking up Jack on the uh, not picking up Jack on the uh O1 here. So really, um, it's yeah, that's that way. form update per second and that was uh, 1/ 100th.

There we go. 1/100th. Um, so every 100th pulse that this thing's feeding in there, every one one of those 100s, there's a little run pulse in there and this one picks it up. No, Ryo picks it up no problems whatsoever.

1100 and this one can't even pick that up. But if you go to 18,000 the Ryo yeah, just picks it up occasionally. but this thing can't even get one in 100. but I've o there we go.

I think we just got it I think it just captured it. Okay, let's be a a bit more fair let's compare it to the ancient 5-year-old Ryo Ds1052e And look at this. Yes, the Ryo is quicker. Look at that.

No doubt about it. Yeah, the 01 does eventually pick it up occasionally, but not nearly as quickly. Look at that. So the Ry goal is, you know if this thing is like 35 wave forat dates per second at this, uh, speed? um, then the uh Ry go there is is got to be.

You know, triple that for four times that? um, at least it SE five times? uh, quicker or something like that. So probably you know, 100 waveform updates per second. At least. So much much quicker.

of course. Granted, this is where you should be using your Um intensity. uh, sorry, your variable persistence. So if we go into variable Persistence of course we can say set that to 5 seconds and we'll be able to eventually capture it and we can see it decay.

Or you could set it of course to infinite persistence. And of course, you can do exactly the same thing on the Rle as well. We can set it to infinite. There we go, eventually.

pops it up. But hey, there you go. The R Go is faster than this. You know, Fairly modern.

What is it? Less than 6mon old 01? You got to be kidding me. And even the Ryo when it's set to uh, long memory depth is quicker I mean there's normal okay, and you put long memory depth on so you get in the full uh, you know one Meg or whatever it is and it it's still faster. Unbelievable. and that sign xonx off.

So even with sign xonx processing on, look at that, No contest. And yes, with 1K memory depth down there, we do get our 3.2 gig samples per second now which is very impressive. And let's see if it halves if we turn on Channel two. And yep, it does it.

halves. Hey. and what was that though? look at was look, there's artifacts there once again, that Bloody that's got to be that stupid Persistence peap of crap again. So let me turn off the persistence again and let's try that one more time for the no look look.

you turn on Channel two and and you get this huge glitchy thing on Channel one. Are you kidding me? look I'm look I'll press Channel two, turn it off and on. That's just garbage and we'll just check that based on memory length 3.2 gig samples per second 1K 10K we're still at 3.2 100K it drops down to 1 gig 1, Meg and 10 Meg are also 1 gig sample a second. So there's an advantage to use your 1K or your 10K uh s memory depth.

You do get a bigger sample rate, but it does have when you turn on Channel 2 of course. as with almost every scope and by the way, that past fail output on the back there is not isolated from your Main's Earth and the inputs. Bummer. Well I could try testing other stuff.

you know, the VGA out the land, the math Fft which I haven't tried yet but I really couldn't be bothered I'm just sick of this thing. It's pretty much a piece of junk. um I you know I don't know why anyone would buy one of these I'd rather have like the Ryol uh 1000 series any day of the week. uh really.

if you're like looking at a budget um scope cuz this thing you can get 100 MHz bandwidth one for 429. There's various models of this. it's like the 8302 or something like that. and Etc there's a whole bunch of them based on uh, bandwidth and uh, sample rate as well.

You can actually get the 300 MHz one in a 2 gig uh 2.5 gig samples per second instead of 3.2 gig samples per second. and well, you know I don't know why you'd want the 3.2 gig sample per second one you you know you're just blowing your money on this stupid 01 thing. I Really? I don't like? Well look, what are the positive things about this? Well probably yeah, it's cheap for the bandwidth you want a 300 mehz bandwidth scope? Yeah, maybe oh gez, but there's got to be a better option out there. Surely it'd have to be.

You're pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel if you're buying this 01. that basically what it comes down to I mean this one that I've got here the 9302. It's um, this one's uh, like ,00 U $1,500 or something. If you go for the 2.5 gig sample per second, you get it for as little as 12, uh, 12 or 1300 about $1,300 or thereabouts.

And when you're buying 1300 bucks I mean you can get the Uh Ry Gold 2000 series the 200 MHz one for 1600. Granted, the 200 MHz version of this 01 is about half that price or about $800 But really, yes, the Ry Gold 2000 is more than worth double. Let me tell you, it's you know, got 10 times the functionality, it's just H and and the performance. This thing is probably one of the slowest digital Scopes I've seen in a long long time.

It's just awful. It's the new, you know, it's the new model, their smart series and it's just. ah man, it's just hopeless. Seriously.

I you know I Can't think of any good reason apart from the battery. By the way, the battery option maybe if you need a portable lightweight I mean it is. Tiny It is absolutely tiny, does have that battery option. don't know how long it lasts for of course not isolated input so you can't use both inputs.

You don't get the uh, proper isolated probes with it and all that. so it's no, it's not really a safe, um, portable, uh scope in terms of like, like the hand prop properly designed handheld ones are. but um, if you do need that battery option, uh, maybe it's okay for that. but I wouldn't pay extra for the bandwidth? I'm not even sure if this thing thing can be hacked up in bandwidth I'm not sure, but really I don't see why you'd spend like serious money on this 01.

It's just not worth it. So maybe if you got the 60 MHz one if you wanted that battery uh option. I Don't know what other battery powered um Scopes are on the market that uh, compete with this one. so maybe that's a selling point in its favor.

But apart from that not it's ah man. it's like it's practically a thumbs down folks. Really, it is. compared to everything else on the market, it's just n it's just not there.

it's it's hopeless. Geez. I Know this isn't review so probably need to use it more, but you know? but I I think I Have no hesitation in giving this one a thumbs down just because there's so much competition out there. Really don't know why anyone would buy the thing anyway.

Think of can I get like a couple of hours of my life back? please if you want to discuss it, jumping over to the EV blog Forum I Think there's already a thread that's already like 50 pages long of this uh uh, 01 scope discussing in it and things like that. So yeah, maybe you know. As I said, this is not a proper review. It's a first impressions type thing and um, you know, really? I Um, need to, um, use it a bit more I guess.

But uh, the thing's just going back. It's just not. Don't waste your money. Better value elsewhere, folks.

Catch you next time.