$60 PC Oscilloscope Review

Owning an oscilloscope is a real gamechanger and these days, scopes are more capable and less expensive than ever before. However, there is a big difference between scopes that cost several hundred dollars which are usually quite good and many of the very inexpensive — below $100 — instruments that are often — but not always — little more than toys. [Adrian] looks at a PC-based scope from Hantek that costs about $60. Is it a toy? Or a useful tool? He answers the question in the video below.

The Hantek 6022BE sports two channels with a 20 MHz bandwidth and 48 million samples per second. The device included probes, too. Of course, you also need a PC, although there is apparently third-party software for Android if you don’t want to lug a laptop around.

With two channels and relatively low bandwidth and sample rates, this Hantek is not going to displace a good benchtop scope, but you aren’t going to get one of those at this price point. The question you have to ask yourself is what do you actually need? In [Adrian’s] case, he wants to work on things like Commodore 64 computers, so 20MHz should be just fine for that sort of thing.

The software looks a bit dated, but it does have a lot of features you’d find on traditional scopes. The triggering, however, wasn’t very capable but since the device uses USB2, you can guess that the triggering is all happening in the device which probably can’t handle anything too complex. The results matched fairly well with a more capable instrument that [Adrian] had on hand.

The verdict? [Adrian] thought it was probably worth the money, but did wish for some things to be better. Many commenters, however, urged him to try unofficial software for the device which is supposed to be much better. We weren’t that interested in the device as an oscilloscope, but given that the protocol is apparently understood, we wondered if it might not find a home as a cheap data acquisition module in some future project.

We’ve seen reviews of Hantek’s scope meter recently. We are always on the lookout for what kind of scope you can get for under $100.