scopemeter

4 Articles

Mustool Scopemeter Review And Teardown

March 15, 2022 by 11 Comments

There was a time when calculators became so powerful it was hard to tell them from little computers. The same thing seems to be happening now with multimeters. They now often have large screens and basic oscilloscope functionality. The specs keep getting better. While early cheap scopemeters were often relatively low frequency, many are now claiming bandwidths that would have cost quite a bit a few decades ago. A case in point is the Mustool MDS8207 which [IMSAI Guy] reviews and does a teardown of in the videos you can see below. It claims a 40 MHz bandwidth with 200 megasamples per second on a single channel.

The only downside in the claimed specifications is that the sensitivity isn’t great given that the lowest setting is 500 mV per division. Then again for a meter that runs under $100, any scope function would seem to be a bonus. The meter does all the other things you expect a meter to do these days, such as reading voltage, frequency, capacitors, temperature, etc. The response time of the meter is relatively slow, but you can get used to that.

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[Kerry Wong] Is Really Into Scope Meters

December 12, 2021 by 13 Comments

If a combination multimeter and oscilloscope is on your holiday shopping list this year, you might want to have a look at some of [Kerry Wong’s] recent videos on the subject. Over several videos he looks at — inside and out — an OWON HDS272S and a Hantek 2D72, both reasonably inexpensive entries in the field. Both instruments are similar and have a few variants depending on the frequency capability and the addition of a waveform generator.

There are several videos on the Hantek device that are a few months old, then some recent videos — like the one below — on the OWON device along with some comparison videos.

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Cloned Memory Module Fixes Broken Scopemeter

June 17, 2021 by 9 Comments

Finding broken test gear and fixing it up to work again is a time-honored tradition among hackers. If you’re lucky, that eBay buy will end up being DOA because of a popped fuse or a few bad capacitors, and a little work with snips and a soldering iron will earn you a nice piece of test gear and bragging rights to boot.

Some repairs, though, are in a class by themselves, like this memory module transplant for a digital scopemeter. The story began some time ago when [FeedbackLoop] picked up a small lot of broken Fluke 199C scopemeters from eBay. They were listed as “parts only”, which is never a good sign, and indeed the meters were in various states of disassembly and incompleteness.

The subject of the video below was missing several important bits, like a battery and a power connector, but most critically, its memory module. Luckily, the other meter had a good module, making reverse engineering possible. That effort started with liberating the two RAM chips and two flash chips, all of which were in BGA packages, from the PCB. From there each chip went into a memory programmer to read its image, which was then written to new chips. The chip-free board was duplicated — a non-trivial task for a six-layer PCB — and new ones ordered. After soldering on the programmed chips and a few passives, the module was plugged in, making the meter as good as new.

While we love them all, it’s clear that there are many camps of test gear collectors. You’ve got your Fluke fans, your H-P aficionados, the deep-pocketed Keithley crowd — but everyone loves Tektronix.

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Soviet Portable Scopemeter Teardown

November 25, 2016 by 5 Comments

Browsing YouTube may prove to be your largest destroyer of productive time outside of Hackaday, once you have started looking at assorted Lincolnshire plumbers or young Ukrainians doing dangerous stunts it’s easy to lose an hour with very little to show for it. There is so much to divert our attention, it’s a wonder that any of us ever make anything!

So to ensure you lose a further quarter hour today, we’d like to bring you [Jesper Broe]’s demonstration and teardown of his latest oscilloscope. This might seem unpromising when we tell you it’s a single-trace model with a bandwidth of 10MHz, but don’t give up. This is a RIMEDA C1-112, a portable instrument made in Lithuania when the country was part of the Soviet Union, and its party piece is that it contains a digital multimeter with a vector display using the oscilloscope CRT.

We’re shown the compact device being unpacked, then put through its paces as an oscilloscope. It gives useful results above 10MHz, but it is visibly losing amplitude and eventually it has trouble triggering as the frequency increases. Interestingly all the controls work in the opposite direction to the ones you will be used to, anticlockwise rotation increases rather than decreases. Then we’re shown the multimeter function, which is compared to a modern DMM and found to be still pretty accurate after nearly three decades.

The ‘scope’s lid is then removed, and we see something of the logic boards that produce the digital display. A host of Soviet K155 series logic ICs are at the heart of it, and at the end of the video we’re shown a period review in Russian with a glimpse at the waveforms they produce to vector draw the figures.

Take a look at the video below the break, we’re sure you’ll agree it’s an instrument that many of us would still find useful today.

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