Atten ADS1102CAL 100M Hz 1G Digital Oscilloscope *New Model with 7" LCD*

WOW!! what a nice scope for the price!! Really nice screen and nice menu to boot! The User interface is quite nice, however since i'm used to using a Tektronix at work it took a little getting used to but not bad at all. This scope is perfect for electrical engineering students on a budget, hobbyists, or working electrical engineers that just want a nice affordable lab setup at home to use for their own projects. Very accurate, and responds well.... Not as fast as a Tektronix or an Agilent but for the price this comes with amazing features!!! Not too loud and doesn't over heat, best of all the build quality is surprisingly premium for such an affordable unit. I was worried I'd get really crappy quality for the price, but to my pleasant surprise this is actually feels like a tough unit that'll last for years as long as you respect it. The buttons feel nice when you press them and the knobs aren't of that poor quality that you get on older scopes. Though I already had probes of my own to use that were better than the ones it came with, it's worth mentioning that the probes that this came with are still well above average quality though they don't seem like they'll last long.Like the Atten function generator i purchased as well, the pc software and the directions are PURE Garbage. I almost gave it 4 stars for that reason but i realized how little i enjoy using the PC interface in general so I decided to give it the score it deserves... 5 stars all the way!

The unit came with a non-functional power cord and with a manual in Chinese! Accompanying software, however, did provide a disk with a manual written in rather poor English. Given the vast number of native English speakers on the planet, it is difficult to imagine why the text wasn't run by one or two of them for corrections to spelling, punctuation, and structure.The unit does work well, I think, except for one glaring problem. When the display is activated, it seriously interferes with the FM band of a decent portable radio anywhere in the room. In comparison, sitting the same radio in front of a Tektronix TDS210 display has little effect on its reception. Furthermore, placing a grounded sheet of aluminum foil in front of the Atten's display greatly reduces the havoc it produces with the radio, verifying that the interference is from the screen.While it might be OK for digital work, this is probably not a good choice for linear work.

The good: Excellent entry-level 100 MHz, dual channel, ****stand-alone**** unit. Excellent display and control layout. Menus are nicely done. Build quality looks fine. Extremely quiet fan. Nice spec's, including FFT, channel add/subtract *and* multiply (i.e., built-in amplitude modulation). Large waveform storage capacity and config storage capacity.The bad: 1) The manual is written by a person who's native language is *not* English. If you've ever tried to read such a manual, you know how much work it is. You essentially have to translate the whole thing if you really want to understand the unit. And it's well over 100 pages of work.2) There is no documentation for the USB interface to the 'scope, and the EasyScope 3.0 software is about as basic (lame) as you can get. Worse, it saves the waveform files out in a proprietary Yokogawa.com *.wdf (Unix wildcard notation here) file format. I gather from my surfing that Yokogawa licenses DLLs with an API (to Atten), and EasyScope uses those DLLs. There is a cut-and-paste-to-Excel workaround that I figured out, but that's ugly, and you can forget about writing any USB interface code to this puppy, unless you have the time to spend sniffing the USB traffic and "breaking the code". You're better off mowing enough lawns to pay the extra $150 for a comparable Rigol.In summary, if you don't plan to use the Atten with your Mac/Linux/PC and are happy to merely **look** at stored waveforms on the scope (as opposed to number crunching them on your Mac/PC), buy it: it's a great value.If, however, you want to do *any* interfacing to the Mac/Linux/PC, you're probably better off spending the extra money and getting a Rigol. (In my case, I want to do i/o to Matlab and my own Mac app). The Rigol provides a clean ASCII Command API, which is IEEE and de-facto industry standards-based (Rigol OEM's Agilent's lower-priced scopes). I hope my modestly costly mistake saves you from the same fate.

I really like this scope. It does what it has to do.I could not find any firmware upgrades up to now and I read it is kind of difficult and risky doing that (upgrading to another model's firmware).But I'm very satisfied with it as it is.

I was skeptical about this O-Scope but it works well and doesn't take up as much space as my CRT scope.

Very good Item the only low point is that it not comes in english only chinise.... so it is not to easy to work with

Some buttons on the scope stopped working within a month and half of use. The PC software is not great either and the manual is difficult to understand. For the time it worked though I was able to use it fine and get data across into my PC (hence the 2nd star). Will replace with a different brand.

Default language is in Chinese, it takes trial and error with the book to get the language in English. It’s an inexpensive scope worth the price, but the features like memory & recall, frequency counter could be improved. It is worth the money.