Tektronix TDS1002B

So, I’m really tempted to pick up a new scope. I’ve got a piece of crap Goldstar (I believe) analog scope I picked up off of eBay for $70 shipped a few years back. While it’s okay for making pretty pictures I’ve been having problems actually using it to test things. For example, when checking out the Alien DAC (photo gallery retired) I couldn’t really see the test patterns I was playing through it over the noise from the scope and probes.

I’ve been looking at one of the new Tektronix TDS1002B scopes. It is a 2-channel, 60MHz, 1GS/sec scopes with monochrome LCD display (image). It’s also got USB ports with support for dumping images to mass storage devices or printing straight to PictBridge compatible printers. (Also, the first good use I’ve heard of for PictBridge… Normally I think of it as a digital camera feature which no one really uses.)

The price for the TDS1002B from Tequipment.net is $1009.80, and I’d probably need to pick up a probe or two as well. I’m still poking around Tek’s site to see if the scope does everything I want, in particular communication with PCs to make sharing of the data easier, but it looks like it will.

Now I’ll just need to budget for it.