My new radio, not vintage at all!

[PerdioPal]

The, er quite generous, bonus came through and I couldn't resist an Icom ID-52 https://icomuk.co.uk/ID-52E-Dual-Band-D-..._Radio_Ham
Lovely radio, built like a (waterproof) tank and has an excellent feel to it, both mechanically and the user interface someone at Icom did really think about this.  I can see me playing and doing factory resets a few time to get what I want out of it, the sky seems to be the only limit.

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
More like a mobile phone with all the features it has.
Fortunately in Ayrshire 2 Meters FM is busy with many QSOs during the day.
Each to their own though and if you enjoy the radio then great, I'll stick with analogue.

[joebog1]

I am with Murphy.
Programming that "radio " will need four years practise. Er I mean, to find the on/off switch, which also controls the volume, the squelch, the channel, the bandspread.
Like my new "digital CRO ", to turn the damn thing on and get a trace takes me 10 minutes.

Progress they said as they walked behind.

Joe

[PerdioPal]

What a pair of cynics ;-) I am finding the control interface very good, the radio does analogue too btw!

[Murphyv310]

Hi
Actually my main 2 Meter radio is a 41 year old Yaesu FT-480R, I get great audio reports both FM & SSB, Nice and simple controls and a florescent display that's easy to read and bright.

[joebog1]

Just take a few minutes to view my oscilloscope specs.
https://www.elektor.com/owon-sds1202-2-c...pe-200-mhz
It seems VERY capable, AFTER you have learned that you can fit 200 functions onto five pushbuttons.
Its probably very logical, I am still trying to learn it all.

I am not a cynic, just pretty much a hater of everything digital. As its just so damn difficult to follow.
I am from the analogue era, NOT really the computer era, although I spent most of my working life building computers.
OH, and I used AN ANALOGUE OSCILLOSCOPE.

Joe

[BusyBee]

I prefer analogue too. I have worked quite a bit with the simpler digital circuitry but things can get very involved very quickly and these manufacturers like to give their equipment the maximum number of features for the minimum hardware. I admit I am sometimes the same when programming my Arduino's. I also admit that I don't use all the functions of my analogue scope. As fo a digital scope if I had one????

Really though digital work is getting so complex that it's more for robots and AI. That's perhaps the danger that everyone is highlighting.

Tracy

[Mark Hennessy]

I've always said that digital 'scopes complement analogue 'scopes rather than replace them.

For many tasks an analogue 'scope is the best fit, but you can do things with a digital 'scope that you just can't do with analogue. There are other things that could be done on either, but generally, a digital 'scope makes it much easier.

For example, the ability to capture a complex signal and zoom right in to examine it is really addictive. I remember trying to debug some PIC code some 20+ years ago where to look at a serial data stream, I was having to rely on really complicated triggering arrangements and the persistence of vision in a dark room (having first tried my analogue storage 'scope). Today, it would be trivially easy to capture that on my cheap Rigol.

I note that the Owon only has 10k sample points, whereas my Rigol has 24M. This is a serious limitation that takes away one of the biggest selling points of a DSO. That's the sort of figure you'd expect in the 1990s, not now.

There's no doubt that a good analogue 'scope is faster and more intuitive to use, and it's often the best option for many tasks. Yes, DSOs are harder to drive, but if that's the price to pay for the greatly increased functionality, it's more than worth it. I'd say I only use my Rigol between 10 and 20% of the time, but on the occasions I do, it's because I'm doing something that can't be done on an analogue 'scope. Just a case of using the right tool for the job. For example, the other day I was using the averaging function to remove the noise from a THD+N residual, so that I could see the spikes caused by (very small amounts of) crossover distortion that were being lost in the noise when not averaged. Without that, I couldn't have been sure of the mechanism causing the distortion I was seeing (about 0.01%, so 80dB down) - obviously there are many distortion mechanisms in an audio amp.

At work, I put both types at each student position. I do see a reasonable amount of scepticism, but by encouraging folk to use both rather than just sticking with the analogue 'scope, it doesn't take long to convert them. To be fair, a lot were put off by early examples, which would alias for fun, not have intensity grading (pixels were either on or off, thus losing the information that's conveyed by the relative intensity of a complicated trace), and had very limited sample memories.

I've probably only touched on 1% of the functionality of a modern DSO. If you're doing things with microcontrollers, you should definitely consider one. But if you're only doing analogue electronics, then you probably only need an analogue 'scope. That doesn't make DSOs bad by any stretch of the imagination - just not the best tool for the job.

I don't follow the market closely, but I will say that we had a cheap Owon DSO that we bought about 15 years ago. I've no idea how representative it might be of modern Owon products, but our one had a lot of design issues. We got rid of it a long time ago. Today, we all reach for a Rigol instead of the Teks by default. I doubt any of us - myself included - expected that would be the case when we bought the Rigols about 6 years back, especially given our experiences with the Owon. Also scary to think that a dozen Rigols cost a lot less than any of our Teks!

[ppppenguin]

Can you even buy a new analogue scope now?

My Tek 2465B is still centre stage on my bench, the latest in a succession of analogue scopes. But with both this and earlier scopes here are a few things where a digital scope would have been so much better.

1: Debugging the Wireless World Teletext decoder back c1976. Strobing out the clock run-in on a fairly modest analogue scope was very (polite term) difficult. Wouldn't have been easy with my 2465B now. DSOs barely existed back then.

2: Checking PAL subcarrier to H phase relationship from first principles. Looking at a few nanoseconds out of 8 field (160ms). I did manage it on a 2465 but it was black out the room and wait for eyes to dark adapt. My first DSO, the almost laughably simple and crude Tek TDS210 made it easy. Dead easy with my Rigol.

3: Anything to do with PAL 8 field sequence or NTSC 4 field sequence.

And an example where I had no alternative. I think it was Mark's suggestion to do it this way. Not having RTFM I didn't even know the Rigol could display the RMS voltage of an arbitrary waveform. When I was modifying Melford monitors to do 405 I needed to correct the CRT heater voltage which is supplied from a winding on the LOPT. Spiky waveform at 15625 or 10125Hz. Beyond my true RMS Fluke DMM's capability. I had thoughts of doing it with optical comparison (I had more than one monitor) or finding a suitable RMS voltmeter somewhere. I had to float the scope (or maybe I floated the monitor) since neither end of the heater was at ground potential but the measurement worked just fine.  I still did a quick optical comparison as a sanity check.

[Mike Watterson]

Digital spectrum analysers, digital scopes and even sound card "scopes" make storage CRTs obsolete. My HP141T analyser finally died (been repaired a couple of times) and I got a Rigol (up to 1.5GHz with a tracking generator, though I had loads of plugins for the HP, up to over 10 GHz). I have a Hameg 20 MHz but got a good deal on a Owon which has a logic analyser option (seller has been promised extra if he finds the pod, which is somewhere in his place). Both are a bit trickier to operate than the analogue but have data capture and PC interfaces.

I doubt anyone makes a CRT scope and certainly not a CRT based spectrum analyser for maybe more than 15 years.