>>I am considering buing/building an oscilloscope for use with general
>>electronics and PIC development, strictly on a hobby basis. I suppose the
>>cheaoes alternative would be a PC 'based' oscilloscope. Anyone have
>>recommendations?
>

From a practical viewpoint, you need to realize that with a digital
scope, you have to sample at least 8-to-10 times per period of the
"fastest" signal you want to measure, to get an adequate graphical
display.

So, even if you get one of the fastest, cheapo digital scopes available,
ones that sample up to 20 Msps, so they will only work well with
signals up to 2 Mhz or so. Beyond that, the signal fidelity really
starts to suffer. And if you sample a 10 Mhz signal at 20 Msps,
ie the Nyquist rate, the signal will look like total garbage.

The cheapo scopes have their uses - some have fancy triggering,
freeze-frame and overlay capability, built-in spectrum analyzers,
additional signal processing, etc, but you have to understand
their limitation --> mainly speed.

A good strategy might be to try to get a used 100 Mhz "analog"
scope for high-speed stuff - you should be able to find one in
the $200 USD range - in addition to one of the handheld varieties
for fancier processing of slower signal, like those from embedded
systems.

Note - to get the equivalent of a 100 Mhz analog, a digital scope
would have to sample at 500-1000 Msps, and would cost $5000-10000 USD.

regards,
- Dan Michaels
Oricom Technologies
http://www.sni.net/~oricom
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