AVR Freaks

I have a Rigol DS1052E myself and the rotary encoders started malfunctioning after a year or so.

I do not use my scope much, so in that year it had maybe 20 hours of real use.

I've read plenty of storys of the rotary encoders failing.

Some claim it is not really the encoders themself, but with a combination of crappy debounce algorithms.

I did not have a working scope to check it at that moment so I don't know.

I replaced one of the encoders, and it works now without any trouble.

The scope is fairly easy to take apart.

There are some threads with reviews and opinions on EEVblog, and the Siglent scopes get quite good reviews.

Especially the newer series the X-E have a better price/performance ratio then the budget Rigol scopes.

(I have not looked at EUR1000+ scopes)

The spectrum analyser in my Rigol is a joke, but the spectrum analyser in the newer Siglents are amazing, with about 140dB or more between big signals and the noise floor.

Don't ask me how they do that with an 8 bit adc, plenty of oversamplin helps, but there must be more to it.

I've seen a review of a German guy with a review of a Siglent scope. He just puts a wire in the input and picks up radio transmitters with the spectrum analyser.

Siglents SDS1104X-E is  a 4 channel 100MHz scope which can also be used as a 4 channel mixed signal logic analyser (on it's 4 inputs).

Software decoders for some common protocols are also built in ( I2S, Serial).

Siglent scopes (often ?) have a rise time which suggest a higher input bandwith than what is printed on the box. The SDS1104X-E has a -3dB bandwith of around 150MHz to 170MHz, according to reviews I read.

SDS1104X-E also has an amazing amount of built-in features, measurement modes, bells & whistles. So much that it gets quite easy to get lost in the menu's, but there is a button to  turn exotic features off and reset them back to basic measurement mode. 

A disadvantage of Siglent seems to be that there are (still?) some software bugs in their scopes. Rigol has apparently ironed out the bugs in the last 5 years, that their budget scope is on the market, but Siglent hasn't managed to do that yet. One of the biggest Bugs in the Siglent is a very slow update via the built in Ethernet interface. It has a http interface so you can use the scope over Ethernet but the screen update and response time is abysmal in this mode. Think about several seconds for a screen update or for settings to get through. Not usable for measurements, but good enough for easy screenshots without fiddling with USB sticks and saving files that way.

About half a year ago I was thinking about buying a better replacement for my Rigol. The Siglent SDS1104X-E was a clear winner for me, but eventually I decided to not buy a new scope because the Rigol I have is adequate for most of my measurements and I do not use it enough anyway to warrant an EUR500 investment. In the last half year the older Siglent models seem to have been mostly sold out. (You do not want those old models, even if they're cheap).

I would be very carefull with Hantek.

Some of the lesser known brands have horrible user interfaces that do not work properly.

If the combined vertical axis of the Rigol already drove you mad you surely don't want to go that route.

But I have to say I'm not sure if it was Hantek where the UI was so horrendous.

The MicSig tablet scopes might be worth checking out.

They are from the ground up built to work with a touch screen interface and can be battery powered.

They would be high on my list if I wanted to be able to take a scope with me on the job.