Bill,
As a technician who used to work at Tektronix, I can assure you that
> digital scopes can do everything that analog van do
Can a digital scope do Lissajous figures?
The ones I have used cannot. They simply don't have a horizontal input!
My own work with both analog and digital scopes makes me think that they
complement each other very well.
Very slow signals are essentially impossible to visualize on an analog
scope. Instead on a storage scope it's child's play. But analog storage
scopes are not the most common thing in the world, so it's here where
digital scopes come in, as almost all of them work as storage scopes.
What I have found hard to do with a digital scope is hunting for
problems. When I know beforehand what signal I have, and just need to
measure it, digital scopes work fine. Instead if I don't know what I
have, it takes a lot of effort to discover all details of a signal with
a digital scope. Instead analog scopes don't "lie": They always show you
all detail a signal has. The only thing you do is scale the image,
horizontally and vertically, to see the parts that interest you. That
makes it easy to discover spikes, transients, high frequency
self-oscillations riding on the desired low frequency ones, and so on.
By the way, my 40 year old Tektronix D755 is asking for retirement. Too
many totally worn potentiometers, contacts, etc, all of which are
Tektronix special parts. Can you, or anyone, recommend a good scope
available for a decent price? Are any of the Chinese ones good? I would
love one that gets well beyond 100MHz. Just two channels is fine.
Manfred
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