I am looking for a new oscilloscope and I am considering an Owon sds7102 100 MHz scope. For $429 it seems to have a lot of great features. My current scope is 20+ years old and this will be like moving from the dark ages to the 21st centery. Does anyone out there have any experience using the FFT function on a digital storage scope? To my uneducated perspective it looks like a poor man’s spectrum analyzer. What are the ins and outs of this function and its limitations. I have read the manual and read some tutorials, but you can’t beat the input from an experienced scope user.

I know this is a cheap import scope,but for home use I think it might just fill the bill unless for some reason it turns out to have a big down side. Thanks, Jeremy Logged. I bought at Tektronix TBS 1042 and use the FFT mode all the time. In FFT mode its especially useful looking at receiver audio and also easy to see the receiver pass band width, as well as audio in the receiver pass band. As a 2 channel 40 MHz scope its very good too.

Works well beyond 40 MHz (derated specs) Read QST review a few months back. Display is 4 or 5 colors too. Easy to use, great tutorial start up disk, 5 year warranty. Run circles around my old Elenco S-1325 30 MHz analog scope. I found the Tektronix scope worth every penny I spent on it. Great value for the buck.

Jun 29, 2016  Christer Weinigel did a teardown of OWON SDS7102 oscilloscope. He explained how its internals are connected, ported. Skip to content. Hacking the OWON SDS7102 Scope. His interests lying on solar cells, microcontrollers and switchmode power supplies. Feel free to reach him for feedback, random tips or just to say hello:-) view all. Rigol DS1054Z Digital Oscilloscope 50 Mhz DSO 4 Channels. Now including software bundle FREE BND-MSO/DS1000Z built into the unit. Displaying 1-20 of 438 Reviews.

This scope samples at 1 giga samples per second as a result my understanding is that it should display returns up to 500 MHz in the FFT mode. I looked at some screen shots of this scope operating in the FFT mode and there is not much data displayed on the screen about what you are seeing. There was a marker for center freq and bd per division and that’s about it. My understanding is that a 100 MHz scope is only good for accurately displaying signals up to about 20 MHz and after that there is about at least 3db of uncertainty in the amplitude of the displayed signal. Is this right?? I understand for $429 I will suffer some trade offs. I am use to using an old 20 Mhz scope with a 3 inch screen so like I said I think this is a big step up for me.

My main concerns are is this money well spent? For the same money would I be better off with a Rigol scope? How can I use the functionality of a modern digital storage scope to make home brewing more productive? Thanks for all the input!!

For what its worth - I put together this video a while ago to discuss the FFT function of a digital oscilloscope, and how to control things like the frequency range and resolution. In a nutshell - the frequency range is DC to 1/2 the sample rate of the stored waveform record (which is often less than the max sample rate), and the frequency resolution is basically ~1/record_length in time (the longer the record length/duration, the finer the resolution). Bottom line, it can be difficult to get the resolution you want in order to look at things like filter shape, etc.