RIGOL DS1054Z 50MHz OSCILLOSCOPE Unlocked 4 Channels up tp 1GS/s 7 In" WVGA 12Mpts Memory Digital Oscilloscope 30,000wfm

Product Information

The scope is excellent value and a great entry level / hobbyist model with a good, clear screen and it seems to be pretty responsive. I don’t think you’ll find a better scope in this price band, even though it has been out for a few years. My workbench having become too small for both projects AND my vintage HP54501A I set out into the interweb with specs and a budget in mind for a new scope. There were many contenders in the my price range but most of them take a fair to inordinate drubbing for their shortcomings on the multitude of blogs and forums.

There’s almost too much in the box. It’s going to take a while to play with all these new features, but it should be fun. I doubt anyone could be disappointed with this scope. I got one to replace my ancient Hameg digital/analogue hybrid and my Philips analogue CRT scopes and it’s opened up a whole new world of measurement options. The first thing [Dave] does once the board is out of the enclosure is taking a nice, clear, and in-focus picture of both sides of the board. These pictures are edited, turned into a line drawing, and printed out on a transparency sheet. This way, both sides of the board can be viewed at once, allowing for a few dry erase marker to highlight the traces and signals.After quite a lot of searching I decided that Rigol seemed to be the best quality of the low end oscilloscopes. I am not an electronics professional and how much to spend on which facilities was not an easy decision. At the suggestion of someone at Telonics I included the DS 1054Z in my deliberations and although at the upper end of my budget it seemed up to date with lots of facilities and the EEV blog convinced me that it was mostly well built. I have not had time to explore the facilities beyond basic working but the PDF user manual is detailed and extensive. Pascal’s not dead. But it’s also not cool to say so. Like listening to ABBA – sing along at the top of your voice (you know all the words anyways), but NEVER tell your friends you do it! Four channel digital storage scope with a 50MHz bandwidth, with colour display. Huge number of facilities on the scope including FFT so you can use it as a limited spectrum analyser, yet to explore fully. With automatic signal analysis of a chosen displayed signal taking the work out of measurements. Each channel control, sensitivity and trace position of all four channels is selected with buttons and then the relevant rotary control is used, needs a little getting used to. Updating of screen is a little slow using the position control, but perfectly usable. As [Alfred] notes, there are many other tools available to fetch data and images from your Rigol oscilloscope. [Jenny List] wrote a two-part series on using Python to control your test instruments, and here’s an example of a simple Python script that does a screen grab. Do you have a favorite way to remotely operate your oscilloscope? Let us know in the comments below. Period, Frequency, Rise Time, Fall Time, Positive Pulse Width, Negative Pulse Width, Positive Duty Cycle,

The only reason for giving four not five stars is that some functions are only temporary and lapse unless you pay extra. Rather mean spirited. The user interface will be familiar to anyone who has used a scope before. The screen is a good size and the overall quality of the unit is fantastic. The DS1054Z itself is a great piece of kit. It’s light, compact and performs beyond what I need it to do. It’s easy to use and a great addition to my steadily growing collection of hobbyist kit.

Product Comments

The independent controls for each channel are nice, but the shared controls can be learned and one develops some mechanical memory over time. I personally prefer the independent controls, but YMMV.

Even if Rigol one day comes up with the idea of only selling the 100MHz version (regardless of the price of the 50MHz), Telonic mention a 12 month warranty, the rest of the world has a 3 year warranty… If you register the product with Rigol it appears to become a 3 year warranty, but only via Germany!Value, Middle Value, Lower Value, Average, Vrms, Overshoot, Pre-shoot, Area, Period Area, Period Vrms, The basic idea was to find the signals going into the scope’s display and read them out using a Cypress EZ-USB board. This is a development board that can be used to design USB devices, and supports the UVC mode. However, with no documentation of any of the Rigol’s internal circuitry [kgsws] had to probe the display connector to find out which pin carried which signal. And since he had no other scope available than this Rigol, he hooked up the various bits of the disassembled instrument so that it could (awkwardly) probe its own internal signals. Not dead by far, as is Delphi. It’s a modern programming language which is easy to use, while having all the power of C++ that you need.