On Thu, 2009-05-21 at 10:20 +0200, Jon Kåre Hellan wrote: > Hi > > I'm thinking about buying a scope. I've seen many people recommend > getting an old analog scope, but they're big! I borrowed a compact 100 > MHz digital scope from work, and it was nice. 50 MHz scopes are a lot > cheaper, though. > > Will I regret getting a 50 MHz scope instead of a 100 MHz one? > > 73 > Jon LA4RT
Of course, it depends on what you plan to use the scope for. For troubleshooting high-speed digital circuits you want the widest bandwidth possible. Overshoot and ringing on a bus line might be hard to see with a 100 MHz scope and impossible with a 50 MHz scope. On the other hand, the frequency response doesn't drop off a cliff right at the specified bandwidth. For example, my 100 MHz scope works just fine for looking at narrow-band signals in the two meter band. The response is down a couple dB but for narrow-band signals that's not a problem. It's an HP54600A digital scope, but I doubt an analog scope would be much different in this respect. A graph of the frequency response (measured with an HP8656B signal generator) is posted here: http://www.cds1.net/~n1al/ham/54600.GIF As you can see, this "100 MHz" scope is usable up through at least the 220 MHz band (at -7 dB). Al N1AL ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
