HMO1024 Digital storage oscilloscope


The youngest piece of test equipment I own and the one I use very often. In the past Hameg was a very well known test equipment manufacturer especially known and highly regarded for the high-quality analog oscilloscopes the built and sold (as far as I know at least in the German speaking countries). Unfortunetly when the first digital storage oscilloscopes were introduced to the market the were to slow to react and other companys like Tektronix took over a big market share. It seems Hameg thought for a longer time that analog CRT scopes are better and that the disadvantages (especially of the first) digital storage scopes make them not very useful. At the beginning Hameg reactet with their CombiScopes: An analog CRT scope with digital storage functionality added on top of it. The advantage of this scope was that the user was able to run it analog or digital, just depending on a switch position. Unfortunetly as far as I know Hameg has not had a big commerical success with the CombiScopes while the other manufacturers were selling a lot of scopes with pure digital displays.



After the company founder retired in 2005 Hameg was aquired by Rohde & Schwarz and today Hameg equipment is build and sold by Rohde & Schwarz as a kind of more entry level/cheaper product line in comparison to the much more expensive high-end Rohde & Schwarz products. The newest Hameg scopes that are sold today even only carry the R&S logo anymore on their front. The todays Hameg scopes are manufactured in the R&S factory in Vimperk in the Czech Republic. My HMO1024 has the following specifications:




I choose to buy this scope because of all the options I was able to get for a still acceptable price: for example the Decode functions which would have cost a fortune with the Agilent 2000X or 3000X Series, or the mixed signal option. Today things have changed again, mainly because of manufacturers like Rigol scopes prices are much lower again and you generally get more options for less money again. Overall I like the Hameg scope and it does what I expect it to do. I think the biggest drawback of the Hameg scope (at least the older model I have, I can not speak about the newest R&S branded one) is the sometimes slow responding user interface and reaction. It also has low waveform update rates per second compared to other scopes, but in my oppinion this does not matter so much. At least for the things I do. At other places the firmware and menue does really shine. For example the FFT function and the trigger options. For some protocols the scope allows you to trigger on certain adresses and so on.



When I ordered this scope I also added the Mixed Signal HO3508 option which uses an additional external POD with 8 digital input channels (comes with nice hooks) to be able to monitor also additional up to 8 digital signals next to 3 (out of the 4 analog) channels. In this way the scope can also work as a basic logic analyzer. What is amazing about this scope in my oppinion is the small size it has, that it can be carried around so easily, and that the fan is very quiet and that it is only running when it is really needed.

Because my scope is the 4 channel version it was shipped with four HZ154 passive probes included (150MHz Bandwidth). Because I know from time to time I have to take my scope with me to other locations I also got the protection and transport case from Hameg.