Experience with Velleman PCS500?

[Tom McAndrews]

I am a hobbyist and electrical engineering student that is looking
into purchasing a Velleman PCS500 oscilloscope that connects to the
computer. The specs can be found at www.designnotes.com. This
company is having a sale and the price looks reasonable for what it
can do. The circuits that I am analyzing are not high speed and the
transient recorder included with this device looks attractive.

My question is this...Does anyone own or have any experience with the
PCS500?

Thank you for your response.

 

[Malcolm Reeves]

On 20 Jan 2004 13:24:46 -0800, justlearning1@hotmail.com (Tom
McAndrews) wrote:

I am a hobbyist and electrical engineering student that is looking
into purchasing a Velleman PCS500 oscilloscope that connects to the
computer. The specs can be found at www.designnotes.com. This
company is having a sale and the price looks reasonable for what it
can do. The circuits that I am analyzing are not high speed and the
transient recorder included with this device looks attractive.

My question is this...Does anyone own or have any experience with the
PCS500?

Hi,

I have a PCS500 and the sig gen K8016. I'm very pleased with them.

I had a problem with the K8016 where I had to add a little cap on a
data line to get it to work. I informed Velleman about this and they
were very helpful and have sent me a replacement PLD which I haven't
got around to fitting yet. Basically I think the design started out
with a slower PLD and as PLDs have got fast the ring on signal edge
eventually caused a problem but that's just a guess.

The software could still do with some improvements but perhaps that
will happen. They took some of my suggestions on board straight away.
These are just little niggles like more ranges than the current 5mV,
15mV 50mV etc.. I'd prefer 1, 2, 5, 10 as it is easier to do the math
in your head. But you do have cursors to do the math for you. The
ability to set the waveform offset numerically rather than just with a
slider. Same goes for the tigger level. Also a x10 setting would be
good rather than having to do x10 in your head.

Of course, like all digital scopes, it can lie about high frequency
noise. If things look odd it is a good idea to look with an analogue
scope. 25Mhz is the highest frequency it can see since it is 50MHz
sampling. That is not a bad rate, especial for the price. The 1G/s
needs a repetitive signal but with that it works well (the help file
explains this). Most digital scopes work the same way.

Together with the K8016 you get a bode plot device which is great for
filters. Again, I would like a few software improvements, like the
option to set start and finish frequencies rather than fixed settings
of 1, 10, 100 etc. If you are looking at narrow filters then you have
to run with big steps to start with then pause and turn the step size
down for the area of interest. BTW I've copied the results from this
and input them into a simulator to cross check real results with the
spice results. Very useful.

The K8016 can also produce arbitrary waveforms - again very useful.
I've used it to produce an fsk waveform.

I might sound a bit negative but I'm not. I'd buy them again.

Malcolm Reeves



--

....malcolm

Malcolm Reeves BSc CEng MIEE MIRSE, Full Circuit Ltd, Chippenham, UK
(mreeves@fullcircuit.com, mreeves@fullcircuit.co.uk or mreeves@iee.org).
Design Service for Analogue/Digital H/W & S/W Railway Signalling and Power
electronics. More details plus freeware, Win95/98 DUN and Pspice tips, see:

http://www.fullcircuit.com or http://www.fullcircuit.co.uk

NEW - Desktop ToDo/Reminder program (free)