Overall I am quite happy with my Rigol DS1052E, its performance is quite good considering its price! Its a definite bargain when compared to other DSO sticker prices; 50Mhz bandwidth, 1G samples per second, has a USB memory stick port which is the answer to most of my needs for extracting data in a high voltage electronic noisy environment. This feature allows me to easily transfer data from the DSO to my computer for documenting my experiments using data plot software without having to resort to very expensive high voltage noise isolation optical links. It has two input channels and descent color display all this for $400 or less! It has sufficient sampling rate to get decent performance at 50Mhz, even at single shot!
When I first got it I check it out with my old restored Tek 190B constant amplitude oscillator set to 50Mhz. The sine wave graphics was relatively clean. I decided to test the smoothness of the graphics that was expected at 1 G sample per second. For single shot triggering a 200nsec pulse generator was used ;the waveform was captured wonderfully. The triggering is descent in the various modes that I tested.
The Rigol software”UltraScope…” has several down sides. Getting the software to install properly in computers running Windows XP can be challenging. I experienced run time error trying to get it to install correctly on several computers which I understand is due to corrupt registry problems. After using various registry clean up software I eventually got the software to operate properly in XP. I have not been able to get it to work in Windows Vista. This soft ware seems to mostly focus on remote DSO operation using USB or RS232 interface. You can down load data to your computer that the DSO just captured; but I have not been able to find out how to down load the reference data stored on the DSO itself. But since I am using the very handy USB memory stick feature for collecting data in a highly noisy electronic environment this software is not very useful to me. Even though the software has problems I am still happy with my Rigol DS1052E; I really can’t complain that much considering its performance and price!
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