Good Digital Oscilloscope for Beginners - Hantek DSO5102P

howdy folks John here from RC helicopter fun calm today we're looking at a new addition to the RC workbench the hand tech DSO five one two zero P digital storage oscilloscope I consider this one of the best valued entry-level benchtop digital scopes on the market right now perfectly suited for beginners and hobbyists so if you've been considering getting your own first digital oscilloscope as I have been for a couple of years now where you already have the DSO five one zero two p on your shortlist hopefully this video will answer more questions and help you out in your own scope quest I want to thank banggood for sending the scopes so we can all have a look at it together as usual i've links below in the description to the scope along with a few others that were also on my short list let's get to the review as i said i've been looking for a decent entry level digital skull for a while now i've had a 60 megahertz analog skull that some of you will have seen in a few of my videos i've had that for many years but with these new low cost under $300 chinese scopes with all the new features and ease of use using that old analog scope was getting painfully tedious not only was i getting tired of counting all the points on the gradall to calculate the voltage and time frame and then having to convert it to frequency it's a heavy bugger and just took up too much space you know i'll mention a few of the other scopes I was also seriously considering at the end of this video if you want to check them out too but this hand tech is hard to beat for the sheer value it offers it wasn't too long ago a digital scope like any of these entry-level ones with the specs and features they have would have cost well over $1000 thankfully the price along with the usability is at a point now that hobbyists do-it-yourselfers first-time scope users and students we can all get a proper scope for home use for the same price or even less than a higher-end multimeter it's amazing ntek itself has a solid name and reputation in the Chinese oscilloscope market along with the other two brands I was considering siglent and of course Reigle this one is one of three in and x-5000 p-series of entry-level scopes this is the 100 megahertz version they also have a 70 and a 200 megahertz version I'm not gonna get into all the specs but main ones are all of them have a sample rate of one giga samples per second and a 3.5 nanosecond rise time and up to 40 killer points of memory now at a maximum 40 k points of record length these are far from what would be considered deep memory scopes but it's entry level and I don't need deep memory for what I use my scope for in the Hobby and as a DIY er if you want more memory a couple of the other scopes I'm mentioning at the end of the video would be better choices however consider that large memory record length really drives the cost up that again is why you won't find deep memory scopes in this entry-level price segment now one thing neat about the DSO 5000 P series is they are hackable now there's information online you can look it up yourself but if you got the 70 megahertz version you could easy you can upgrade the firmware to bring it up to 200 megahertz I got the middle one just because the value is so good you can usually get this one for the same price as the 70 megahertz the general rule of thumb when selecting a scopes bandwidth is to pick it at least four times higher than what you measure five times would be ideal now you can certainly measure higher band widths but you lose in ten uation so your voltage will drop as you're measuring higher frequencies so the general rule of thumb is four to five times and rarely do I even get into the megahertz frequency range I'm usually always checking stuff in kilohertz now another great thing about this scope was the display size it's a proper seven-inch 800 by 480 high resolution anti-glare display many entry-level scopes are only 5.7 inches Marv coming out with 7 inches so that's not that big of a thing anymore but you know a nice big display is awesome scops if you don't know if you're still watching you chances are you know what an oscilloscope does they primarily measure voltage changes over time you've got your voltage scale on your y-axis and your time scale on the X and unlike a multimeter where you can just take voltage readings this will record those voltage readings as they change and you can see that graphically and it just helps you debug stuff it helps you understand how circuits work you know I really fully didn't understand how PWM signals worked in receivers going to the servo until I actually used a scope to see the waveform and same thing with s bus you know until I actually saw how the packets are arranged and then zooming in on a packet which this scope has no problem doing it's very cool oscilloscopes are fun to play with and these new digital ones they've got so many features they're so easy to use that really anyone can pick one up if you can use a multimeter you can use one of these now the scope itself it's a good-looking scope all digital scopes look very similar you know you've got your vertical adjustments your horizontal your trigger you've generally got your main menu selection up here and of course there's a two channel there's our two channels of input and they've got nice function buttons that line up well to the graphical selections that come up on the side of the screen it's got split screen all scopes have these little outlets basically a 5 volt one kilohertz square wave that's how you calibrate your probes and we'll do one just to show you what that's about it's you know it's a good-looking like I said a good-looking scope the you know I kind of like this teal color the cooling fan is there it's got lots of ventilation throughout you know nice thing most ghosts are like this but it's something to look for is your power in light is recessed so you can put this right up to the wall the power light the power plug isn't going to be preventing you from putting it right to the wall there's a nice little carrying handle and then it's got rubber feet at the back and these two little flip down feet so you can have it on your bench and it'll sit at an angle so you can view the screen just to improve screen viewing angle and got a USB port that you can plug a USB stick into and that allows you to record or take photos to download waveforms simple very simple one-button ordeal it's also got a USB input at the back this is to either update firmware or record right onto the computer of course it's Universal voltage it shipped with a European plug the c-13 on the end and an adapter for North American market but it's not grounded and that is a big fail so now I'm just using obviously a North American plug which is grounded but for safety reasons you generally want these grounded now also on safety just mentioning it real quick if you've never used a scope before one of the biggest things that beginners learn the hard way is your probe or earth ground and you can cause problems if you're hooking the grounding point up to something that's not an earth ground you can short it out so unlike a multimeter which is floating it doesn't really matter if you've got the negative at a voltage potential when you're measuring circuits with these things you know if it's a battery-powered circuit no big deal but if it's hooked to a power supply or something that has a grounded source yeah you can cause problems and what else do we get so we got two probes and they're decent they are the pp 150 probes these are good up to 100 megahertz and will calibrate one here just to show you what that's about it comes with a manual and just another another thing to be aware of there's a selection on here a one x and a 10 x it's actually it's divided by ten generally you always want to be in the 10 x scale and that's what's nice about these digital scopes you can select that so the values are reading correctly but when you're in that ten time scale you can read higher frequencies and it even says that on here in the one time scale it only works up to six megahertz in the ten times scale or work up to 100 megahertz input voltage is saying it can go up to 600 volts yeah I wouldn't want to be passing 600 volts through that and I wouldn't want to putting 600 volts into the scope can certainly measure line voltage though with it no problem with that so what are we getting here we've got it's just a warranty card maintenance record yeah I don't know what kind of value that is pantech certification past QC this little disk has got the USB software if you want to hook it up to your computer and it's also got the instructions and really good instructions by the way 71 page manual in fact I've got it up on the screen here let me just bring it up I'll pan up hopefully you can see this I don't know if you can see that and this is probably a zoom in but yeah it's just a decent manual it if you don't know much about scopes after reading through this it'll give you a really good basic operation of the scope and it's good translation it's not like the usual unrecognizable Chinglish you know someone did a really good job with it so great manual and that's on the disc then what else do we have in here packing lists what it comes with the scope tube probes power line which is useless the CD the warranty card manufactured certificate oh and a USB cord somewhere around here oh there it is and with all that let's power this thing on and calibrate a probe okay I've got it plugged in power it up see how long the boot time is it's about 10 seconds already timed it and there we go just gonna turn this off you set that and we will plug our probe in so these probes they have a little adjustment pot in them which is basically a variable capacitor and that's how you calibrate the probe it's just a BNC connector and now the other end of the probe should probably unravel this but so here's your ground and this is your probe end just for unloaded so we'll put our ground on our ground pin and attach the probe okay so there's our square waveform and just then I guess that looks pretty good zoom in a little bit more so here's our adjustment tool and as you can see this is overcompensated this big tick so we want to turn that down we want to get a square wave on here going the wrong way ooh that's under compensated getting pretty close there we'll just zoom in no it's pretty good so that's all there is to compensating a probe now we'll go over some of the features on the unit really quick if I had if I went through them all this would be a few hour video it's just amazing even an entry-level scope all the cool stuff they can do I've got both channels plugged in we're looking at a couple of waveforms these are just being generated by one of these cheapy little waveform generators they're around 10 bucks they're a kit while at least this one was a kid I might do another video on that I bought two kits so maybe I'll do another video on building up but regardless these put out a square wave along with either a triangle or a sine wave which we can see on here and you can set the frequency anywhere from one Hertz up to one megahertz as well as the amplitude you can change the amplitude of the wave at least the sine in the triangle wave you can't change the amplitude of the square wave so if you've never used a Scouten scope before one of the really handy things with digital scopes is they will set everything up for you if you don't know how to zoom in and out and get your time scales set you know these knobs on your two channels this would select your vertical position so this is basically selecting volts per division and same with your same with channel 2 there and what's nice they're both separate so you can independently set them you can move their positions relative to each other up or down and then your time scale which is the horizontal scale you can zoom in you're sorry zoom out or you can zoom in on the waveform but if you don't know what you're doing you see if you've got something really screwy look in here you know you turn it on that's what you're getting you can just hit this auto set and this scope will select the best voltage and time scale Tilly's get you in the ballpark and then of course you can you can move things around as you want the other nice thing is the triggering but if things aren't triggered properly the waveform will be down it's dancing all over you can just hit set to 50 it'll it'll bring the triggering point to the center of your waveform and of course you can also dial it up and down and there's triggering menus it'll show where it triggers there's so much that this will do but we won't get into all that just to show you what the channel menu looks like it's got the coupling type you can limit the frequency to 20 megahertz that just eliminates a lot of noise when you have that selected and you can have course affine voltage adjustment this is where you would change your probe attenuation if you add it at one times but we've got it out 10 times to get out of the menus you just push the F zero and you can see I don't know if you notice that but all the function buttons they line up really nice to every one of the selections in the window here you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna flip these feet down there no we might be able to see it a little bit better you know oh and it's also got a split screen which is neat so this window here is showing what's in a big window bring up both waveforms and then if you wanted to capture a waveform so hit capture and then we can zoom right in on it or zoom out some of the other functions it's got the utility function you can look at system information firmware update you can save the waveform do a self calibration that's recommended when you first get it it takes a while it takes about 10 minutes to go through calibration but you don't want to have to take it in to get it calibrated they do it all automatically now this button will take you to the next screen I've got the keypad be pond or off so if you wanted to have beeps you could that drives me crazy so I've got it turned off there's several different languages you can have it in you can have the background at different colors I've got it at the dark or the black right now it doesn't look it on the display or on the camera but it's a nice dark grey you can have green you can have this purple kind of a yellow pea soup green or blue but I like the black the best you can set the time system status on page three you've got pass/fail menu or a quarter filter printer configuration and then an option screen lots of different settings there display settings you can have your waveforms as vectors or dots persistency I just got it set to auto DSO mode contrast you can dial the contrast up or down whenever you hit a selection that is adjustable this little green light comes on and you turn this knob to adjust it and then page to the graddic whole lines you can have them off dotted or full the intensity of the graddic holes you can turn it up or down refresh rate I've got it set to auto and the waveform intensity again you can dial that up or down so lots of adjustability on this thing and again this is an entry-level scope you know the higher the schoo goes just the more they do and this just gives you a really simple overview you've got an acquire menu real time or equ you can you can peak it or average it you can have the average how many points you want to take there's our memory depth we can only go to 20k when we've got two channels because each channel is taking up memory so if you want deeper memory if you want maximum memory you can only use one channel but for a beginner scope more than enough horizontal menu we didn't look at that you can look at the major minor window set clear all each to time-division coarse or fine horizontal position coarse and fine actually like course you can move it a lot quicker and measure that's one of the best features you don't have to calculate anything you don't have to count you know we're at 2 second 2 volts per division so you could count on all York radicals to figure that out but it gives you the voltage right there peak to peak 4.16 on our sine wave here if we were measuring our second wave that we'd be in the blue and this would all be blue instead of yellow showing the frequency if we turn up the frequency you'll see the frequency getting higher and higher 257 kilohertz or we'll turn it down so it automatically shows you all that and that's what's so cool about a digital scope you don't have to dick around so we'll get out of this and we'll just I'll just do a cursor real quick you can select time or voltage or track and this way you just select your two points your starting point in your endpoint and it will either give you the time output or the voltage output so you can do all that so many ways to to check what's going on and here instead of counting graticule so if you've had an old analog scope reeve used one these are so much easier and maybe one of the best features for a beginner is this help menu anytime you're any of the last menu where you you were in or the screen Jesus that showing up probably isn't but it gives you a full help tutorial on whatever you were doing so if we were in the measurement screen and we hit help it'll tell you all about how to use the measurement functions no it's page 1 of 4 H 2 of 4 page 3 or 4 and to exit you just use one of your function buttons another cool thing that all modern-day digital oscilloscopes have even these entry-level ones is a fairly decent math menu on my old analog scope I only had one math function and that was channel 1 plus channel 2 which is what we're doing right here and this new purple waveform is the combination of the sinusoidal channel one with the square of channel 2 and that's what we would that's what we're getting but you can also subtract waveforms you can multiply them you can divide them and this is also got an fft math function which is basically giving you a frequency constant of a signal if you don't understand fft hit the help I've never had that function before gonna start playing around with that more it will give you different windows how you want to display the FFT signal and you can even zoom in if you wanted to another thing I should mention is just how nice all the buttons are you know they're a nice soft silicon rubberized button all the encoders are really smooth they're a 12:00 position encoder this one's got a push button all the potentiometers are very smooth they also have a push button to zero things back out and a few of the buttons as you can see you're backlit but just a really nice layout and this is pretty standard layout on these beginner scopes basically if you can use one you can use them all if you've really messed everything up you can't get anything to work there's also a default setup and it brings everything back to the default settings I don't want to touch that because I've got a few in here I've already set that I don't want to change Wow let's do it what the hell and it takes everything back to its original settings we'll do the auto set here see if we can bring our waveforms back there they are I'm just gonna dial up the amplitude bring this down there powerful scope for a beginner but easy to use so the other scopes I was looking at in case you're curious I'll put little photos of them up in the top corner here so you can have a look they're all two-channel they're all high resolution 7-inch displays and the first one is the Cygnet SDS 1052 DL it's only 50 megahertz again would have been fine for me as far as its sampling rate though it's only 500 mega samples per second not one gig so half the samples per second and it has up to 32 K points a record length so even lower than this one and it's roughly the same price as this one so just it didn't it didn't have as many features but cygwin makes a great scope as well it looks very similar so you can check that one out as well again it's around 250 bucks the siglent SDS 1102 CML it's a hundred megahertz so same as this it's got one Giga samples per second so that's good it's got up to two million points a record length of memory so a lot more memory with it and it's around $300 so if you needed more memory than 40k that might be one to look at and then the cream of the crop and if I needed a long record length this is a really good scope it's the Rygel 1202 Zed Dashie 200 megahertz bandwidth so fastest of all of them one gig samples per second so same but it is a deep memory scope 24 million points of deep memory on it so it's by far the best scope of the bunch as far as memory goes but you pay for it it's around 360 so $100 more than this one and any of these along with this hand tech DSO 5000-series you know they're not the only good entry-level to channel scopes of course but they are the ones that ticked off the most boxes for my specific needs this one has more than enough features that I need and the price was you know it's the best priced one of all and the best value as far as I'm concerned if you have experience with any of these oscilloscopes or any other entry level digital oscilloscopes and want to share your thoughts in the comments to help others please do so you know the entry level digital scope mark it is becoming fairly saturated and it's getting hard to navigate for newbies cheers folks thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: John Salt

Views: 141,664

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Id: mIoHFwyeE44

Length: 25min 55sec (1555 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 07 2020