Learn from a particle physicist

Nov 10, 2014 learning electronics oscilloscope

The Rigol DS6104 oscilloscope I purchased with my start-up arrived today. It has no touch screen, but the price is 1/3 of those from big companies. The CD attached contains the software and drivers to operate the oscilloscope through USB or LAN. The readme file tells you to download USB driver from NI first.
But it is misleading. One just need to extract files from \SOFTWARE\Ultra Sigma(PC)Installer.rar using 7z, run setup.exe and all drivers from NI will be installed automatically.

Some basic things about oscilloscope

Oscilloscopes nowadays are basically all Digital Storage Oscilloscopes or DSO in short. They have front-end electronics to deal with analog voltage input, analog-to-digital converter to digitize the input signal, and internal or external memory to store the digitized waveforms for later display and analysis.

The top 3 oscilloscope companies are Tektronix, Agilent and LeCroy. Recently, Rigol in China provides the cheapest low end oscilloscopes with high quality.