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Like most of us who like building electronic projects other than the Multimeter my most useful piece of equipment is my
Oscilloscope. I started many, many years ago with a valved Tektronix scope obtained when the
firm I worked for upgraded to a newer model. But it took up half the shack and so later I sold it and bought a cheap single channel Russian CI-94 scope which
did a fair job on signals up to about 10Mhz. But in the last few years Digital Storage Oscilloscopes have become much more
affordable and I bought a small DSO-203 handheld scope which really impressed me but was very difficult to set-up due
to the clumsy controls and menu structure. So I bit the bullet and invested in a 1Ghz sample rate DSO-5102 which sits on
my work bench and does a fantastic job. But for anything off of the workbench it's really too large and clumsy
which meant using the DSO-203.
Then I saw a cheap Chinese kit, the DSO-138 for around 20 Euros and bought it. But could a scope for 20 Euro's be any good ?
Building it meant soldering small SMD resistors and an SMD chip ( a first for me) but as you can see it works and is much easier
to use than the DSO-203. That said if does have it's limitations with a sample rate of only 1Mega samples per second it displays
sign waves up to 100Khz or so very well and square waves up to about 30Khz but perfectly good for audio and many switching
projects. Now I'm just waiting for the case to arrive that I have ordered for it and then it will be really useful.
Will it replace my DSO-5102, well 'NO' but for 20 Euro's it's a very nice little scope indeed.
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