You get what you pay for. The Velleman scope is pretty limited - there's
a good review in a recent issue of Electronics Australia which I know
you won't find easy to get up there, but I'll see if I can dig it up.
Tek make excellent gear - and yes, it would be nice to get a scope trace
into the PC. There are PC scope cards (National Instrument make one, for
instance) of varying capability, but a PC is a noisy environment and I
have doubts about this concept.

But if Santa were bringing me a scope (I have an old, but good, 50MHz
Philips dual-trace unit, so I guess I can get by), I'd settle for a good
used analogue scope. 50MHz nice, 100MHz wonderful, with good 10X probes
please. If you want to get a trace into your PC, I wonder if one of
those Quickcam thingies would capture a scope screen, placed nice and
close. Not exactly perfect but, y'know, most people don't *really*
measure pulse widths to the nearest nanosecond and so on. The graticule
calibrations will be close enough for most measuring - scopes aren't
voltmeters or frequency counters too (well, yes, the Tek unit *is*, of
course - but as you say, its 1,000 big ones).

A good used scope should be, I suppose, $400 or so - I believe some of
the older and larger but technically excellent Tektronix units can be
gotten for a song. Try searching the web and see what you find. You can
have it mailed to you for next to nothing.

> ----------
> From:         Jonathan M. Newport[SMTP:jnewport@MAIL.ORION.ORG]
> Reply To:     pic microcontroller discussion list
> Sent:         Thursday, December 04, 1997 3:04 PM
> To:   PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU
> Subject:      more scope questions
>
> This is yet another of the numerous postings concerning scopes.  I
> have
> been told that santa may bring me a scope this holiday season but he
> wants
> to know which one.  I have been looking at them over the past several
> months to try to determine this.  All I have are catalogs of new
> scopes so
> how would I go about gettinga used one?  there are no surplus stores
> around here (springfield mo, you know north of BRANSON), so I supose
> I'll
> have to order one.  One of the features that I would REALLY like
> having is
> that of getting a scope waveform onto my computer.  So, I originally
> looked at that one that velleman makes that hooks directly up to the
> computer.  It says that it is a 32 mhz scope but I don't know the
> sampling
> time on it but the price is right (300 bucks).  now I have also seen
> probably my dream scope which is the Tek 210, it comes in a slimline
> package which I thought was neat, and it also said it could be hooked
> up
> via rs-232.  Will I need a separate program to get the data on my
> computer or does it export it in a picture format or what?  the only
> problem with that is its around a 1000 smackaroos.  if any one else
> has
> any suggestions/comments, likes/dislikes, etc. responde, s'il vous
> plait.
> (je suis une canard giganesque)  hee hee.  thanks
>
> Jonathan
>