Tektronix TekScope vs Fluke ScopeMeter
Tim Jackson
I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
others anyone knows of.
Fluke's ScopeMeter 99B and Tektronix's TekScope THS720A are both 100MHz
units offering similar features and I'm trying to find compelling
reasons to go one way or the other.
Also, I could consider the Tektronix TDS220 bench top unit which is a
very lightweight unit and could be used portable, although it isn't
battery powered.
I guess I'm really wanting answers to two main questions with as much
detail as possible:
1 Fluke or Tektronix? Why?
2 If it's Tektronix then do I go for the THS720A handheld or the
TDS220 benchtop portable? Why?
I'd be grateful for any and all opinions and info.
Tim.
/\_/\
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Tim Jackson
Tim Jackson
I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
others anyone knows of.
Fluke's ScopeMeter 99B and Tektronix's TekScope THS720A are both 100MHz
units offering similar features and I'm trying to find compelling
reasons to go one way or the other.
Also, I could consider the Tektronix TDS220 benchtop unit which is a
Tim Jackson
John D. Seney
> I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
> range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
> others anyone knows of.
>
> Fluke's ScopeMeter 99B and Tektronix's TekScope THS720A are both 100MHz
> units offering similar features and I'm trying to find compelling
> reasons to go one way or the other.
>
> Also, I could consider the Tektronix TDS220 bench top unit which is a
> very lightweight unit and could be used portable, although it isn't
> battery powered.
>
> I guess I'm really wanting answers to two main questions with as much
> detail as possible:
>
> 1 Fluke or Tektronix? Why?
>
> 2 If it's Tektronix then do I go for the THS720A handheld or the
> TDS220 benchtop portable? Why?
>
> I'd be grateful for any and all opinions and info.
>
> Tim.
Hi Tim:
Check out my home page for Digital Scope.FAQ
Regardless of why anyone else thinks a particular brand
or model is best, what counts is what YOU think is best.
Finding that out usually requires that you look at what
you REALLY want to accomplish with an instrument.
Good luck!
John D. Seney
http://www.mv.com/ipusers/wd1v
Yves Houbion
>
>I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
>range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
>others anyone knows of.
>
>Fluke's ScopeMeter 99B and Tektronix's TekScope THS720A are both 100MHz
>units offering similar features and I'm trying to find compelling
>reasons to go one way or the other.
>
>Also, I could consider the Tektronix TDS220 bench top unit which is a
>very lightweight unit and could be used portable, although it isn't
>battery powered.
>
>I guess I'm really wanting answers to two main questions with as much
>detail as possible:
>
>1 Fluke or Tektronix? Why?
>
>2 If it's Tektronix then do I go for the THS720A handheld or the
> TDS220 benchtop portable? Why?
>
external sync) ares completely isolated (no common ground). If you work with
power thyristors,triacs... this is a must.
TODDS
Tim: you should figure out what you need from a scope and then find a
scope that matches your needs.
My company makes PCbased scopes. We have just come out with a unit that
attaches to the Parallel port of your laptop or desktop computer.
It is very small(about the size of a VHS tape).
32K buffer per channel
100MSa sample rate per channel
FFT(on DSO2102m)
Measurements
XY
Save/load data to disk.
$499 for DSO-2102s
$599 for DSO-2102M
Tim Jackson wrote:
>
> I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
> range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
> others anyone knows of.
>
> Fluke's ScopeMeter 99B and Tektronix's TekScope THS720A are both 100MHz
> units offering similar features and I'm trying to find compelling
> reasons to go one way or the other.
>
> Also, I could consider the Tektronix TDS220 bench top unit which is a
> very lightweight unit and could be used portable, although it isn't
> battery powered.
>
> I guess I'm really wanting answers to two main questions with as much
> detail as possible:
>
> 1 Fluke or Tektronix? Why?
>
> 2 If it's Tektronix then do I go for the THS720A handheld or the
> TDS220 benchtop portable? Why?
>
> I'd be grateful for any and all opinions and info.
>
> Tim.
_________________________________________________________
Manufacturers of PC-based test instruments
Digital Storage Oscilloscopes
Logic Analyzers Device Programmers
Todd Schreibman
Link Instruments e-mail: To...@LinkInstruments.com
369 Passaic Ave, #100 <http://www.LinkInstruments.com>
Fairfield, NJ 07004 Fax: 201-808-8786
Phone: 201-808-8990 BBS: 201-808-8559
John Freitag
In article <5p7mko$n...@hermes.fundp.ac.be>, yves.h...@fundp.ac.be (Yves
Houbion) wrote:
> In article <33b4d9bf....@jhb-news.iafrica.com>, t...@micro-delta.com
> says...
> >
> >I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
> >range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
> >others anyone knows of....
Got both at work so I guess I can give a comparative answer.
1. The Tek is much better at being a scope, brighter, more clearly defined
trace and more "scopelike" controls.
2. The Fluke has lots of nice features, meter functions, Max, Min Average
history, simultaneous meter and scope functions.
For me, the Tek wins for all around scope use.
The Fluke is a great portable tool (except for the wretched NiCad battery
pack) and is great to use in the field.
My advice is find a distributor who will let you give both a test drive.
John Freitag
--
THE REPLY, OF COURSE, DOES NOT REPRESENT ANY OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE
UNIVERSITY, only my personal opinion.
Joel W. Kolstad
John D. Seney <jo...@wd1v.mv.com> wrote in article
<john-29069...@wd1v.mv.com>...wrote:
>
> > I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
> > range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
> > others anyone knows of.
I second the other guy's opinion to get a TekScope. You'll definitely
appreciate the higher sampling speeds if you're doing high speed design
with non-repetitive signals.
> Check out my home page for Digital Scope.FAQ
John's web page does have some good information on it, even if it is a
little biased towards LeCroy. :-)
> Regardless of why anyone else thinks a particular brand
> or model is best, what counts is what YOU think is best.
Good point... if John is in (or close to) Oregon, Arizona, or California,
he can find both Fluke Scopemeters and Tek TekScopes at your local Fry's
store to go and play with.
> Finding that out usually requires that you look at what
> you REALLY want to accomplish with an instrument.
Yeah, but in the case of the TekScope vs. Scopemeter, I'd dare say that
there are incredibly few things that a Scopemeter could ever do that a
TekScope couldn't do just as well. The only reason I could see for getting
a Scopemeter today is if you were really turned off by Tek's user interface
(and hadn't yet been exposed to a LeCroy to see how bad things can REALLY
get, GUI-wise :-) ).
---Joel Kolstad
Carl D. Smith Jr.
In article <01bc85d7$dc5397e0$0307e38f@zimbo>, "Joel W. Kolstad"
>Yeah, but in the case of the TekScope vs. Scopemeter, I'd dare say that
>there are incredibly few things that a Scopemeter could ever do that a
>TekScope couldn't do just as well.
Here's my 2 cents for this thread. After many months of development of a
motor control system for electric fork lifts, much of which involved driving a
fork lift around with a $6000 Tek TDS 420 bench scope balanced on top,
dragging an extension cord behind, just so we could look at the PWM to the
motors, the other engineers and I convinced management that it was worth the
investment to get a TekScope or a Fluke ScopeMeter. It came down to me to
decide which one to get.
The biggest thing that made me decide that the TekScope was better was the
sampling rate. The Tek and the Fluke have similar bandwidths, but the TekScope
has a higher sampling rate, so you can look at much higher frequency signals
before it goes into equvalent time sampling mode, where it takes multiple
passes to fill in the screen and becomes useless on non-repetative waveforms.
Another thing that really impressed me with the Tek was a little demonstration
by the sales rep. He had a little battery powered circuit board with an
inverter set up as a square wave oscillator. He hooked channel one to the
output, and the screen showed a nice square wave. Then he hooked channel two
to the same output, but reversed - the probe clipped on ground, and the ground
clipped on the signal output. Instead of shorting out the output as most
bench scopes would, since you have a ground clip on both the ground and output
and they are connected in the scope, it very happily showed channel 2 as an
inverted square wave. The grounds for the two scope channels, the ground of
the multimeter, and the ground of the wall wart power transformer input are
all isolated from each other.
The isolated channels comes in handy for our motor control system in our
electric fork lifts, since they use an H-Bridge configuration to reverse the
motors field winding polarity. With any normal scope, where the grounds are
connected across all channels, if you put one channel across the field winding
your scope ground is now switching between ground and battery positive
depending on which direction the motor is running. So if you try to look at
another signal, and you connect the second channel ground clip to ground, the
ground leads tend to burst into flames next time the motor switches
directions. :-) Not that I have done that before... :-)
The final thing that convinced me to go for the Tektronix was Fluke. No
kidding. They faxed me a page that had a list of features, and which scope
was best in that area. The Fluke ScopeMeter had more "wins" than the
TekScope, but they were all in trivial areas, such as the Fluke could be set
to display units in "Amps" when you are using a current probe, and when you
multiplied a voltage trace and a "amps" trace from a current probe, it
actually displayed units of "watts." But the TekScope had the "wins" on the
really important points, like 5 times the sample rate.
>The only reason I could see for getting
>a Scopemeter today is if you were really turned off by Tek's user interface
I thought Tek's user interface was better than the Fluke ScopeMeter. Of
course, I could have been biased by the fact that we have a couple Tek TDS420
bench scopes, so I had been using a very similar interface for a year or two
already...
Carl Smith
cds...@pionet.net
Merlin Zener
John Freitag wrote:
>
> In article <5p7mko$n...@hermes.fundp.ac.be>, yves.h...@fundp.ac.be (Yves
> Houbion) wrote:
>
> > >
> > >I'm looking to buy a portable/handheld 'scope and am trying to get a
> > >range of opinions on the offerings from Fluke and Tektronix and any
>
FWIW I've had a TDS210 for a few months now, and I'm very happy with
it, apart from the initial learning curve. The manual is useless,
and even the salesman who sold it to me couldn't work it out!!!
But, after some persistance (especially working out which of the
trigger modes to use when:) it's become second nature.
I find it really handy to see the waveform and have the DC level,
freq, P-P and RMS volts all displayed simultaneously down the side...
--
Merlin Zener phone (+61) (0)7 5578 5011
Musician, Technician fax (+61) (0)7 5578 5311
Gold Coast, Australia email m...@bigpond.com
http://www.ion.com.au/~merlin
(bigpond homepage coming soon)
"no-one ever went blind from looking on the bright side of life"