New Osmelloscope (... oscilloscope) Tek TDS420A

While trying to work on my RL02 drives, I realised that my Farnell 20MHz scope is terrible, and measurement taking is likely wrong. After a recommendation from a friend, I found a nice Tektronix TDS420A on eBay for about £300. A bit expensive, I thought, but when compared with a new Rigol, for example, it's actually a good deal.

Here are the rough specs:

• Four channel
• 200MHz
• Enabled Options:
  • 05 Video Trigger
  • 13 RS232 Interface
  • 1F File System
  • 1M 120,000 Point memory
  • 2F Advanced Digital Signal Processing math

Here is a photo of the TDS420A:

One of the nice things about this scope is that I can save the waveform over RS232 to my PC. Here's an EPS which I have turned to a PNG:

I generated this with a straight through RS232 cable

cat /dev/ttyUSB0 | tee out.eps

I'm using tee instead of a redirect so that I can see when the transfer has finished.

Tags: electronics