How good can a new $60 oscilloscope actually be? (Hantek 6022BE Review)

well hello everyone and welcome back to adrian's digital basement on today's video we're going to take a look at an oscilloscope that is really inexpensive it's not this rygall 1054z which i've used on the channel a bunch of times i've owned this thing for a while now great scope but it's three or four hundred dollar price range is a little bit expensive for the casual person who might want to be trying to do a little bit of repair on an old machine so what we're going to look at is this it's the hand tech uh something or other oscilloscope here it's usb it's only sixty dollars so it's nice and cheap and let's see if this thing is any good so without further ado let's get right to it [Music] so i think it's a pretty amazing time that it's possible to get stuff like this for as cheap as what i actually paid for this it really wasn't that long ago where you had to spend a fortune to get any kind of digital storage oscilloscope none of these boxes are checked on here to show the model number but if we look here there's a barcode here it is the handtech 6022be and on hand tech's web page here it's part of the 6002 be series and hand tech offers up different models with different bandwidth and uh this is the lowest cost one so i think it's 20 megahertz maximum i paid just under 60 for this device from aliexpress i think it might have been like a dollar or two less actually because i think it was on sale at the time i got it but just looking at the picture here you can see that this comes with two probes usb cable installation cd and the usb oscilloscope itself and if you are not comfortable buying from aliexpress you can buy from amazon as well here in the us amazon prime for 62 dollars so literally about two dollars more expensive than aliexpress this particular listing is a third-party vendor so i can't vouch for if this one comes with all the same stuff but the listing on aliexpress where i bought from says it's the official store of hand tech now i have no idea if this is for real actually them or a vendor calling themselves official store but if you go to the store home page here there are all sorts of other pantech devices that are for sale including some other devices which i've actually purchased and i'll be reviewing as well on separate videos but in this video we are going to take a look only at this device and we're going to see if this thing can actually allow me to do the troubleshooting i need to do to fix a computer now the main goal of this video is to see if a 56 or a 60 oscilloscope can actually be a useful tool in the past i've used this logic probe during troubleshooting and i think i spent like 20 dollars on this thing or maybe it was 18 or something like that while this is a useful tool in some ways i really don't find this thing to be super useful and if you're gonna buy one thing to troubleshoot an old computer that's not working i feel like an oscilloscope is really your best bet the problem was is that oscilloscopes in the past were so expensive they were sort of a luxury item that were hard to have and afford only if you were a real professional would you spend the potential large outlay of cash on an oscilloscope otherwise you had to really rely on tools like the logic probe so these had a place but now when things are as cheap as this i think the days of having to rely on a logic probe are just over so let's just take a quick look at the hardware here before we test it out so there's the main oscilloscope box metal uh what's going on here all right well there's a regular usb port there's a little rubber cover here that says usb xi i don't know what that's about so i'm just going to put that rubber cover back on there are the two inputs there's no trigger input or anything like that there's a ground terminal and also i think is like a square wave output that's good for calibrating the probes you have to turn a little knob on them to adjust them otherwise that's pretty much it here it confirms the specs of this particular scope 20 megahertz 48 mega samples per second which is honestly really quite slow but i think it's going to be fast enough to still prove useful for at least troubleshooting machines like the commodore 64 or other 8-bit machines which run at like one two three megahertz things like that let's see what we got in here for the probes i don't expect these to be particularly good quality me considering you could spend a hundred dollars on a scope probe not too bad um it looks like it's 10x or 1x which is good you really want to have at the minimum a 10x probe relatively standard fare here we have the ground lead we have a clip here for clipping onto like a pin or a lead this should pull off i assume there we go so pretty standard affair not very sharp but i mean honestly what am i expecting i got two of them here um for not much money there are little rings here you can install them on the probe as this one has a yellow one on there now let's see what color this one has got yellow as well but you change them because on here there's a blue input and there's a yellow input which should match in the software just so you know which probe is which they've included this little tool here it's just a little tiny flat blade and it's for turning um i think it's uh compensation i think it's what it's called you connect up to the the test signal here and you turn that until the signal looks good i'll do that when i have this thing up and running okay so let's just quickly talk about the capabilities and features so it says bandwidth is 20 to 200 and up to 250 mega samples a second that is not this one obviously we saw i think the specs said it was or here on the bottom 48 mega samples a second so not fast but if you're thinking about buying an old analog oscilloscope uh what you're gonna get one that's not expensive 20 megahertz is pretty typical and like i said that's good enough for working on a commodore 64 things like that i've looked around a little bit to see if analog oscilloscopes are still cheap and easy to get and it seems like at least here in portland that it's not the case anymore even the most like basic oscilloscope that works and is not ancient it's like 150 now like the prices have really gone up on those and for me personally i've always only used external oscilloscopes like uh the rygall 1054 z i have up there great scope very very happy with it but it's like 300 bucks is like the starting price and it's very capable and it's a great scope but that's certainly more scope than you need to just fix a commodore 64. i'm pointing to it and you can't see it but i have the virtual bench that was donated to the channel and that's what i use for capturing oscilloscope screens on the pc here and it's a pretty good scope it works well it's got a lot of other capable features like a power supply and a signal generator logic analyzer things like that but if you go look up the price of the virtual bench like for the current version of it it's like thousands and thousands of dollars so it's really not a good option for home users unless you can get one really cheap like i used one i really do not recommend you even bother looking at the virtual bench anyway back to the spec page so like i said this goes up to 200 megahertz uh 250 mega samples a second i did look at some of the higher models when i was shopping and they were a lot more expensive like this is the really cheap one and the price goes up pretty steep uh after that in fact when you buy like the 200 megahertz one it's i don't remember the exact price it was like many hundreds of dollars i mean it was as much as buying the rygall 1054z which is a four channel scope and it has a screen and it's extremely capable so i don't know if the value proposition is there once you go up to the higher models but i'm hoping the value proposition is there for this one so a couple key points to talk about is usb2 and it does not require an external power supply so it's powered off the bus so that's good for just ease of use it supports windows nt and i'm pretty sure on the box it says windows 2000 so obviously this thing's been out for a while but i think more so they released the software to work on those really old os's because if you're using this in an environment like a manufacturing plant they might have really old pcs just because it does specific workflow things and they can't upgrade it so it's nice that this has wide compatibility so if you are not a fan of windows for instance and i don't even know if this has linux software or mac software then you can obviously use any old laptop you find at the thrift store for five bucks as long as it's got some version of windows on it and this is actually going to work on it there was a more expensive version i think of this same one though like the same speed and capabilities that had a wireless connection on it and then there's an ipad app it was quite a bit more expensive than this one for having no other capabilities except for working on an ipad so i figured that it wasn't worth me testing out but maybe that will work better for you if this thing even works well anyhow looking through the rest of these features and it's just all the usual stuff that's like the oscilloscope features uh digital ones that is so that's cool okay got some pictures here i mean there's the software it looks really old it's running in xy mode there um but yeah i mean let's let's give this thing a test right so when i download the software the date on the file on their website was like from 2014 but the driver file that they had was from 2021. so i'm hoping at least there's good windows 10 64-bit compatibility which is what i'm using and indeed these are the drivers for this particular one and they date from 2021. so i'm going to skip the manual and i'm just going to go right to trying to use this thing so let's install the software that's a pretty old looking installer looks like it's a 32-bit application but whatever as long as it works and let's plug in the usb cable right away over in device manager just shows unknown device so i'm going to manually go to that directory and i point it to the driver directory oh there we go [Music] and here's the hand tech app let's run that and see what happens oh there it is all right so let me connect up a probe channel one is the yellow probe and let's hook on to the test signal right there okay so right off the bat there it is i have to say the update speed is definitely not very fast let's switch this to 10x and put this down to one volt per division let's see if we can move this down yes we can all right horizontal it's got this knob that's sort of weird okay so let's see this little thing going on here should be a square wave so this is where the little adjustment tool comes in with this little pot and you turn it until you get a nice square wave this is i think compensation it's called there we go all right and this is the trigger oh cool you can just drag it so you can obviously just drag this up and down no problem let's turn off the second channel so this is really the first time i've ever seen this software and it's basic but certainly works um i'm used to the virtual bench software which has basically at the top here like a view of the waveform you can move around like you could scroll back and forth this one you can still scroll you have to drag back and forth but on the virtual benches at the top so it's kind of nice plus there's a little like thing to change the time base quicker than this this has a little drop down or you can move this like knob thing which is a bit strange in the view menu you can turn on measurements so there's the frequency 1.03 kilohertz and let's turn on peak to peak and top so when the measurements are turned on like they are here this is kind of a way to use your oscilloscope as a multimeter so we know that this signal or if i was on a dc signal that is it would show what the dc voltage is they're 2.07 volts and the frequency of course is like a good little frequency counter now one thing i'm not loving is when i turn on all these measurements it turns this into like a scrolling list even though look at all this space here why exactly aren't these things listed more in columns take up more of the space that way i don't have to lose all this room of the waveform view to be honest these are the ones i would probably keep on anyways and obviously if you turn on the second channel it's probably going to list them i don't know i would assume it would have channel 2 here but that doesn't seem to be the case so anyways i don't know it's not great but it's workable now one thing i noticed is the update rate is not super fast on this and you can kind of see it like running it i don't know like uh five frames per second or ten frames per second or whatever it is and the virtual bench definitely runs at a much higher refresh rate and that is over usb 2 as well i think the virtual bench actually has the hardware buffers and a lot of more processing oomph in the unit and it's really just sending like a little window view of what it's capturing to the computer so even over usb 2 that can update really quickly i think the hand tech is actually sending everything it captures to the pc and we can see here by scrolling around like if i hit pause it's there stopped but you see all of this is captured so it's actually capturing a lot more than just the little part we're looking at now there may be a setting to say only send us this what we're looking at here and nothing more or maybe a little bit off to the sides and then it would update a lot faster so i'll have to poke around a little bit all right so there are of course built-in cursors as well so you set one there and we would set the other one actually how do i use this a little fiddly okay i see you click there and then you drag so what that's going to do is going to tell us how long this waveform is and right there that's telling us the frequency between these two cursors is 998 hertz or one kilohertz which of course matches the frequency counter down here which is it's doing that automatically but sometimes it's nice to measure the time between two cursor marks and you can see down there the time changes this is exactly one millisecond between these two but say i want to know oops okay this is definitely fiddly okay i wish you could um basically click and drag and then click again or something okay so we know that half the waveform is 499 microseconds because a thousand microseconds is one millisecond so it is definitely nice that there are functional cursors here and it looks like you can also uh what's this first button do none cursor okay i see cross cursor so these are like two points uh wait i don't know okay yeah same it has the same mechanics so this measures the height and uh the width and you can also just do a height as well so like there and this will tell us the voltage so 2.07 okay you go the other way from the bottom up and 1.98 so it's close enough to be able to figure out like the amplitude of a waveform by measuring specific points of it using the cursors so if we move this waveform right here where the rise time is in the center and then we turn up the time base oh that's weird it like moved around okay that's a bit weird how it doesn't seem to stay but you notice actually it's updating a lot faster so that's kind of nice okay with the sample rate much higher notice the entire sample width is pretty small but it's also no longer triggering properly anymore anyhow i really don't like when you change this like there how it see how it moved i'm expecting it to like stay in the same spot but it definitely shifts around which i don't love get to this okay so we're getting to the limit of what this thing is capable of i think 10 oh no okay we're still getting an edge oh but look it's all weirdly jittery even though the trigger it'd be nice if i drew a line when you move the trigger the trigger is right in the middle of that it shouldn't be having a problem that's because the trigger circuit in this thing is just not great but it was 60 dollars so what am i expecting so triggering is super basic edge triggering auto normal or single so i guess i go to single shot mode you put it in single nose it's stopped here when i hit play it will only sample one frame basically single shot mode is useful if you're triggering off one signal to look for another on the other channel and the scope will sit there and wait for the trigger conditions to be met and then it will capture that data and you can look at it and that's why these digital scopes are pretty cool and very useful over an analog scope one of the original analog scopes they don't have any capability of triggering and storing the waveform for you to scroll through and zoom into there are some analog scopes wall that have a crt that can but those are actually digital scopes just using a crt for a display but the truly analog scopes have no capability of storing a waveform i mean maybe certain ones do like really high-end ones but certainly none that i've ever worked with that are like the you know basic economy models so that's one huge benefit to these digital scopes and even this cheap one can do this stuff here in the utility menu it's got some interpolation but it's grayed out i wonder why maybe that's a feature of a higher model that i don't have or maybe i have something turned on that prevents me from using those features it's kind of weird they're grayed out in my opinion there is an intensity setting here which what does this let us do oh okay you just adjust like the brightness of the dots and stuff waveform i mean this is pointless on the old analog scopes you could turn the brightness up and down on the waveform and sometimes they had a backlit reticule i think it's called with the lines and you could adjust that as well it's pointless on this on a digital scope like this on a usb one that is i kind of breezed over this before but the triggering is only edge triggering edge would be like this right here transition and it's triggering here at this threshold now you can do a positive or negative slope so this it's either going up or down more expensive scopes have way more capabilities um like even the virtual bench which is kind of simple the triggering it still allows you to do like up and down so you can do both you can also do triggering with delays so it can trigger and then wait a specific time helpful if you're trying to capture a signal that you know comes with a certain delay after the trigger fancier scopes like the rygall and maybe more expensive usb scopes have like fancy triggering off like spi or all sorts of other signals in fact the rigel can decode video as in like ntsc or pal video and trigger off of certain scan lines like way more capabilities than than this has but for basic work i think this is totally sufficient looking at the horizontal time base it pretty much has a must have a roll mode here right oh no it doesn't five seconds so that means it takes five seconds what is it what's it even doing oh there you go so typical oscilloscope roll mode it means it like samples so slowly and then it's good for seeing signals that change slowly um i don't like voltages from a power supply that go up and go back down i don't know what it's doing right now so theoretically it should capture data every second but i don't know doesn't seem to be doing anything oh i'm noticing the manual here says it has math capabilities it does indeed so we hit that okay so that's sort of useful i don't really use this myself it lets you add the a and b signals or subtract or multiply divide or do a fast fourier transform which was like a spectrum analysis basically so if you have a waveform it uses the computer cpu to calculate the frequency components inside like a sine wave or something like that and here we are doing like a frequency analysis of this waveform and it's not easy to see can i even move this around no oh i got to close this so see this h here but basically this would be i guess around one kilohertz here and i'll say there was like a one and a five kilohertz you know we should see two peaks in here but i don't see a way to measure the math so it'd be nice if you saw a peak here you could click on it or something and um you know it would tell you what it is but measure only has channel one and two so okay i guess there's just no way to do it but whatever this is not like the most useful feature for troubleshooting old computers there's an r button here which is a reference and i think what you can do is you can save a waveform and you hit load and then you can load that in and to save it i have to click out of this but i think it lets you it loads uh this blue color waveform on here and it just allows you to compare what you're capturing to what's been saved so it's just helpful from a comparison standpoint here in the manual it's showing how to use the interpolation settings um and i can't it's grayed out the interpolation helps when the sampling is of a frequency that's close to the maximum so on step you're just seeing like the actual a to d converter like that's what it looks like then there's this linear interpolation which sort of starts to draw lines and then there's sine x over x which actually takes the points and draws bezier curves between them now that gives you a false sense of what the signal is because imagine this signal actually looked like this like it was a stepped square wave well it would show up as this when you have sine x over x turned on which is not really how it looks so it's nice to be able to change the mode to get a more accurate representation although it says here the default is sine x over x which is going to be fine for the purposes of troubleshooting a computer so there's the sample rate turn way way up okay so i just realized it says down here 48 megahertz so i guess this thing even though it's only a 20 megahertz scope it's actually sampling of 248 megahertz you're gonna need at least double the sample rate to actually get any useful data and even double is really pushing it think about this cds were 44 kilohertz right that was the sample rate on cd or is sampling cd and when you look up the specs the rated maximum frequency cd can do is 22 kilohertz so half of the sample rate and that again is because that 44 kilohertz is enough to sample the top and the bottom now when you're exactly half the sample rate the problem is is any definition of the signal if you have a sine wave it's lost all you're going to get is the top and the bottom or somewhere along that point if it's a sine wave it's going to be terrible sounding so i guess this thing can sample at 48 kilohertz so that's good it actually means that 20 megahertz it should still be able to show something somewhat usable now one thing i noticed look at five microseconds this is actually updating pretty quickly i'm kind of shocked it certainly would be nice if triggering work though it's just not working at all at this time base i poked around a little bit more and i'm really not seeing any other features here like this is it it's very very basic but for the price i think this is going to be functional enough to be actually useful so let me grab a 64 and let's actually look at some real signals on it all right here is the zip64 what i like to do is grab a clip lead clip it onto a ground point and then stick this on the probe it's not good for really high frequency stuff but it just gives you more flexibility than having the probe sort of stuck in one small place make sure you stick the boots together though so you don't sort stuff out accidentally let's pull this off i'm going to change the scope to 2 volts per division set the trigger somewhere in the middle and let's start right here on pin 2 on the rf modulator which is the luminance signal out of the 64. all right so we're just seeing what looks like noise and that's because the time base is not nearly fast enough so let's speed this up and let's change this to 1 volts per division and let's move the trigger up here okay all right so what we're looking at here is the actual video signal the black and white part of it coming out of the 64. the color or chroma signal is on a separate pin so we can look at that separately but this is giving us a very good representation that this machine is working now here's what i mean if i turn this off okay so it's going to drop down when i turn the power on you're going to see these bumps go up and down which is the sync signal but if you have a black screen all you're going to get is that line on the left side of the screen and that is so we turn this on there it is that's the line that's the white line and then you notice after a little while we get all this that's the actual scan lines that make up the picture but right here you have a sync pulse and then you have this peak right here and that specifically is the white line on the left side and let's do a test let's pop out the kernel rom there we go and we turn the machine on that's all we're going to get so it's a good way to confirm for instance that your 64 is at least powering up to some extent but if you're getting a black screen on your monitor and you want to make sure it's not the rf modulator or cable you can actually probe the pin here and look at the data that's coming out and look at the signal coming out of the vic 2 and see that this machine does have a black screen so if we zoom out a little bit we might see those although no okay and so these are the white lines that are happening like on every scan line and sometimes it's not super low and in fact i don't know what's happening there like if we zoom in here but because i zoomed out and the sample rate is pretty slow on this thing it was actually just missing those all together so it looks flat here it's not really flat if we press play on there and we zoom in okay well it moves around when you zoom and i gotta say that's pretty annoying um okay it's not triggering so yeah there there it is basically anyways i mean we're actually unfortunately kind of near the limit of the capability of this this particular scope if i go up to five microseconds we can no longer trigger anymore so i have to say i'm a little disappointed that triggering is so rudimentary on this device that it's not able to trigger on any of these faster time bases i mean there's a lot more time bases available here okay this one just doesn't work see none of these work properly it's just all over the place nope maybe this one's working so let's hit pause scroll around no there's nothing you can see there so it's running at 48 megahertz and it just i don't know it's capturing little windows you hit pause nope nothing usable there and five microseconds okay there's usable signal but it's not triggering all right so let's move over to one of the data bus pins here on the rom that i have taken out so there's a lot of activity going on now if i turn the machine off and on you know you can kind of see stuff happening let me zoom in a little bit does this even work zoomed in more it's not triggering [Music] i don't know yeah i gotta say i wish this worked a little better at these time bases because this is right in the sweet spot for like working on one of these machines now the thing that's definitely what you can do is we would be able to tell if there was a bus conflict like you see it's hidden up here near five volts and there's a little bit of a droop down here but like say it was only going up to like here in the middle i would definitely be able to tell that there's a problem and in fact if i switch it to 10 microseconds which is the one that actually triggers um you know i can turn the machine off and on and we can see all sorts of different activity happening on the data pins now this is kind of normal on a 64 or when there's no rom it's it's going to act a little weird like this and that's because the processor sees floating inputs kind of randomly but at least i'm able to kind of make heads or tails of what's happening here now here's an example i switch this over to five so it's not triggering properly but we see this waveform on one of the pins to the rom and look one megahertz so it's it's measuring that speed properly and i guess that's i think this is probably one of the select pins so it's trying to select the rom and that's not working uh let's hit play and turn the power off and on yeah i think it's just it's trying to read out of the rom and oh okay so they are changed to that now again because i can't really zoom in anymore i mean i can but if i hit play oh wow it's triggering it says triggered there that's so weird it wasn't triggering properly on those other pins but this one is okay triggered yeah it's working definitely not working on five nanoseconds though yeah i mean okay i'm very surprised we're on 200 nanoseconds and that pulse is properly triggering let's switch the so it seems like in the middle here it's like a sweet spot when we go over the edges here it kind of comes and goes but that is a usable signal and look 1.02 megahertz all right i'm a bit surprised it just seemed to not trigger properly on those lower frequency signals and on this one it's working all right so now i'm poking around on the vic chip and i'm looking for high frequency signals to see what this looks like and it is not able to like give us an accurate capture of this clock signal i think this is the uh what 14 megahertz one it's it's kind of telling us the frequency here but not very accurately and and at this frequency with this scope we cannot trust that this waveform is correct now you see zoomed out you see this like weird pattern going on that's not really there that's just the aliasing of the sampling happening and so i'm going to say that this scope is not really useful for anything over like two or maybe four megahertz that's going to be the limit of measuring signals with that but here i am on the clock pin for the 6510 on this machine and there it is 1.021 megahertz so like i said one two megahertz it's able to show us that waveform so you know that the processor on this machine is getting an appropriate clock signal okay so the scope is now connected to one of the ram chips on the data bus and at 500 nanoseconds again it's the triggering leaves something to be desired but it does still show us that we're getting pretty much good valid ttl signals on this databus line so again useful if we want to see if there's some kind of a bus conflict or some other issue okay i plug the same probe into the virtual bench here and let me just show you um what the virtual bench looks like in comparison so the whole ui on this is so much easier to use and here we are sampling at five microseconds we were doing that on the other one but look i go up to two to one nanosecond or one microsecond 500 nanoseconds still triggering with no issue plus i really like that when you zoom in and out it doesn't move around like see this valley here moving it out stays exactly the same place so here we are at 100 nanoseconds and there is you know looking nice and clear now if you remember when we looked at the other one on this same data bus pin we saw very similar looking things with this sort of sloping marks here and a little bit of stuff in the middle and little glitches here and there we're seeing the same information as we were on the hand tick so it really does show that for something that costs just 60 dollars it's far cry from the capabilities of the virtual bench but the virtual bench is thousands of dollars this is 60 and for working on a slow 8-bit computer like this this is absolutely good enough okay conclusion time is this thing worth 60 dollars i'm gonna say yes actually it is if all you need to work on is low frequency stuff or eight big computers like this this is totally fit for purpose i wish the software were a little less glitchy a little more capable i wish it didn't have that triggering issue but the fact you can get a brand new two-channel digital storage oscilloscope that does require a computer with two sets of okay scope probes i'm amazed i'm honestly amazed this thing works so much better than i actually expected it to work would i recommend this over an old used oscilloscope well if you can get one of the old ones for cheap for the same price as this you might be better off especially if it's an old digital storage one like a tektronix i think there's some really kind of old ones there with a really they have bad lc screens but they work it's almost certainly going to be more capable than this because it's going to have higher bandwidth it's going to have good triggering that works properly but on the other hand that relies on you being lucky and finding one for cheap and like i said i looked around and i couldn't find anything that cheap everything was quite a bit more expensive than this and if you were just a casual person with some very casual needs of repairing machines or having around the house i really do think this is not a bad option now i actually did order two other low-cost oscilloscope solutions to test out and this is the first of the three i bought that i've reviewed and even tried out so i can't say if those other ones are going to be better but if you watch the channel i'll review those and of course i will compare back to this one to see what i think about it compared to this 60 one but yeah so far not so bad in fact next time i do a repair on a machine or i need an oscilloscope i'll use this so yeah we'll get some use out of it see if it can actually help me fix something and where i don't have to resort to using the two thousand dollar device here on the bench so with that i'm going to end this video here i will put links in the description if you want to buy one of these yourself and i guess that's going to be it you know thumbs up if you like this video all the usual youtube stuff huge thanks to my patrons their names are scrolling up the side of the screen if you want to become a patron you can do so at the link in the description and i guess that's it stay healthy stay safe i'll see you next time bye [Music]

Channel: Adrian's Digital Basement

Views: 405,529

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Id: 8ts5J09Y7Gc

Length: 36min 34sec (2194 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 05 2022