On Sat, 22 May 2021 10:36:50 +0000, Bob Eager wrote:

On Sat, 22 May 2021 02:37:39 +0000, Johnny B Good wrote:

You can now buy a brand new dual channel 200MHz BW Siglent SDS1202X-E
for a mere 360 quid (including free delivery) from two of the three
official UK Siglent agents

I have one, and am very pleased with it.

I bought it last year, direct from siglent.eu. Ordered at lunchtime, and
here the next day, from the Netherlands (yes, I paid for fast delivery).

I bought some other Siglent gear, too. I wanted to get it all before
Brexit kicked in.

Presumably you were able to make a significant saving compared to
ordering from a UK official Siglent agent.

I chose Labtronix on the basis that they were a long established company
based in the UK and bound by SOGA and the free delivery on orders worth
more than 70 or 75 quid took only 3 business working days.

Much later (last year), I chose Telonic Instruments for the same reasons
(plus I'd lucked out on getting a generous discount) when I upgraded to
an SDS2104X Plus (now hacked to a 2504 with all the trimmings). I don't
think I've had to wait more than week tops for delivery with either of
these establishments.

I've kept hold of the 1202 since it's still a very useful 'scope for the
bulk of my hobby activities. It's more compact and lighter in weight and
boots up in only a third of the time taken by the 2504 which makes the
1202 look like a toy by comparison.

Also, it only consumes 22W versus the 54W consumed by the 2504. The
wider bandwidth, additional two channels, features and a lower noise
floor front end all come at a cost.

The fourfold upfront purchase cost isn't the only one to consider,
there's also the energy consumption cost as well although that's unlikely
to add much more than a fiver to the annual electricity bill even if I
didn't have the 1202 to fall back upon for all but the most demanding of
tasks.

Whilst I had been expecting to see an increased energy consumption
somewhere in the region of 15 to 20 watts, that 32 watt increase had
rather taken me by surprise.

I wouldn't mind so much if the boot up time had been only a little more
protracted than the 1202's 16 seconds but the 2504 takes a full 46
seconds! That's longer than my desktop PC takes which also boots a Linux
OS (admittedly,from a 250GB SSD rather than flash ram).

I can only surmise that the doubled up channel count and the larger
feature set has increased the boot up burden somewhat probably involving
timing constraints that can't be mitigated by simply throwing more
processing power at the task. Hey ho, the price of progress I guess?

--
Johnny B Good