G’day! Today I'm reviewing the Rigol DS1052E Oscilloscope, 2 channel 50 megahertz and 1 Giga samples per second, this is an absolutely seminal piece of kit from wrangle. A couple years ago this is the scope to get if you are looking to get your first scope or a really decent scope for absolutely as little money as possible, let's take a look!

As always a quick tour around the case before we power it up, we have of course our two channel inputs, the external trigger is on the front so that could be a nice feature, a lot of scopes have the external trigger on the back so if you find you need to access the external trigger regularly that may be a nice feature to have. Of course, the vertical horizontal and trigger controls pretty standard to all digital storage oscilloscopes these days, the menu controls and run controls are at the top so the control interface that's something that's largely quite common across most scopes. On the top we have the power switch of course a fold in handle, power on the side, folding feet on the bottom and we have the pass/fail connection on the back as well as serial and USB device. So, that is a tour of scope we also have USB host on the front so you can plug a flash drive in to save waveforms and recall them if you need to.

Now one thing that I already really like about the 1052 E is that the corners are built into the case meaning that I can just lay it flat on the bench without fouling this pass/fail output, provided you don't have anything plugged into these three connections and the power connection is on the side. You can just lay it straight down on the bench so that's probably a nice feature if you find that you might be sitting on a stool in some cramped location and you need to have this scope down on the ground beside you because you're moving around the workshop or what-have-you so that's a pretty nice feature. Anyhow let's turn it on and see what the screen looks like.

So, that took a little less than 10 seconds to power on which is pretty short for a digital storage scope. I'm not going to be using the ten times probes that come with the scope today because I’m using my function generator so I'll make sure that the channels are set to one times for both the probes, yep and I can plug my function generator in, triggering off channel one so that channel two isn't locked. So, at the moment we don't have a frequency reading, yet I haven't brought that up but I'm generating a 1 kilohertz and 2 kilohertz sine waves, so if I bring those to the centre let's take some measurements. So, I'm going to bring up the measurement menu by pressing this measure button here and I'll just zoom the camera in so we can see the screen a little better so here's my measurement menu down the side and I can clear that away with this menu on/off button and let's just take some measurements for channel one, that's done offline so I'll leave source set to channel one and I want to measure something to do with the voltage so I can press that measurement button, this shows us what we're going to measure and how about I just measure the peak to peak voltage what other options are there though?

You can find the average voltage which would be zero for a Sun light so that's not very interesting, let's just go for voltage peak to peak so I can press that knob button there and you can see we have a voltage peak to peak channel one pop-up and of course I can do the same thing for channel two and just bring up that voltage, scroll down to voltage peak to peak and press the knob and I've got two more or less identical sine waves so how about we do some math with these sine waves now. I could stack up some more measurements, but I'll just clear those just to keep the screen nice and tidy, how about I change the peak to peak voltage of the second sine wave to maybe half what it currently is. So I’ll bring that down to 2.5 volts peak to peak, that was on channel one not channel two, but that doesn't really matter so I can clear my menu and I'll just go over to the math menu and we can do a little bit of math now so we have our two waveforms along the bottom and this third channel M for math is the math function so we have source A and source B as channel one and channel two and the operation that we're doing is A + B so you can see that we have this kind of superimposed or some sine wave, the map functions on this scope are not so feature filled we only have 4 map functions but we do have FFT which is really nice to have if you're doing anything with RF or audio.

I’ve turned off the channel two and math trace, let's just look at channel one, the last function we have is the ref key which gives us a reference waveform and this is useful if you want to compare the signal on a single channel, say channel one over time so as a case study, let's say we're decoding signals from an infrared remote, so we could capture a signal in on channel 1 for one key press and we can save that signal with the reference key, so we now have a reference signal save and I can just bring that up here. So this white channel or this white trace is labelled “R” for reference and now let's say we captured another wave form, so I'll dial with this sine wave up to 2.5 kilohertz so a couple of times faster and hit run and now we have our saved reference as well as our trigger on our new information, so while you can't do math operations between say channel 1 and reference you can definitely visually compare them so super useful say if you want to decode remote signals and just a quick dive through the remaining menu options for this video.

I'll tell if the reference signal and we can just bring up the cursor menu and press that again and again to cycle through the modes, so here I'm in the track mode and this multi-purpose knob to move that point along the waveform and read off data about that point, we can go to the acquisition menu in fact I'll turn cursors off because that's quite distracting, we can go to the acquisition menu to change the acquisition mode.  I do have a memory depth option, so this is a one meg memory depth oscilloscope so not super deep but definitely adequate for a lot of uses, the storage menu of course we have the internal and external storage available on the USB port so we can store the waveforms as the proprietary Rigol waveform o you can just download some free software to review you waveforms or you can save them as images and of course just raw CSV data and the utility menu which is just a basic setup of the scope, so feedback, sounds, language using the iOS and pass-fail etc and we also have the display time.

So there you have it, a quick review of the Rigol DS1052E oscilloscope, it's a really capable scope but by the day standards it might be a little low on features so I recommend this scope if you are looking to keep cost to an absolute minimum or if you were actually looking to have a scope low in features just to keep things as simple as possible to use. there escapes from the Rigel DS1000