GW INSTEK GDS-2062

I bought this oscilloscope only recently. The list of features were excellent, and it cost about half what an equivalent scope would have cost from another manufacturer. I wish I had paid more. Don't get me wrong, it has lots and lots of cool features. When I calibrate the two channels, and attach the probes to the same ground and DC voltage, the scope reports values that differ by 10% between the 2 channels. The firmware appears to be not completely finished. It took me some frustrating days to work out that the 'menu off' button that restores the scope display doesn't work when the scope is 'STOP'ped. It has a sample memory longer than the section presented on the display. It has a cool 'window' bar to tell you how much of the sampled memory you're currently looking at. You would expect the horizontal /div and position controls to allow you to see the rest of the sample memory. They don't. It has completely locked up on me a few times, necessitating a power off and back on.

Emails to the company, and enquiries placed via their web form go unanswered. A representative from their US operation did once reply to say there would be updated firmware available in February. There isn't, in March. But hey, my own deadlines can be quite flexible. I am at least convinced that one day, they might release some updated firmware that might even be an improvement.

I did briefly enjoy using their Freeview software for a while. To overcome the problem with not being able to look at the full sample memory, I repeatedly triggered the scope against the same high-speed (~10MHz) digital event, each time advancing the trigger by a few microseconds. Each time I did that, I used Freevew to capture an image of the scope screen and then used the GIMP (marvellous, everybody should download it) to stitch the images together into one big image. Then I could read the content of the mysterious message. This is extremely laborious, but it worked. What I saved in the price of the scope, I lost in time. Recently though, the Freeview software just stopped working. WTF? It's a MS-Win based program, so when it stopped working, it told me with a little dialog. I don't know what the dialog was telling me - it was one of those win dialogs that have no understandable content, but you know, deep down inside, that this software is never going to work ever again, unless you reinstall your system and make several other things worse in the process.

So I've been writing a Java utility to display the waveforms. I'll post it somewhere when it's done. It will at least give me a choice of systems to connect my scope to. I end up transferring all the data from the Win XP software on my laptop back to my Linux desktop to work on it, I'd rather just use Linux on the laptop. In case you're wondering how it's going... well! Well, a little bit slowly. I'm using a null modem RS232 lead at the moment, and the gnu.io serial port classes from rxtx.org

Better get back to it, fixing the tools is easier than getting my work done, but it won't pay the rent!