Full-featured oscilloscope performance in a compact, low-cost package

RS Components has introduced an ultra-compact oscilloscope that has a footprint approximately the size of a passport with a thickness of only 19mm. The new RS Pro 2205A-20 is the smallest oscilloscope in the RS Pro range. Connected and powered via USB it offers a bandwidth of 20MHz and has an arbitrary waveform generator. These features make it the ideal scope for engineers on the move: small enough to fit into a laptop bag while providing all the features and performance of a traditional bench-top oscilloscope. The specifications cover a maximum sampling rate of 200MS/s, software-enhanced resolution up to 12 bits, and high-speed USB streaming up to 1MS/s for waveform captures of up to 100 million samples in length. Input range is selectable from ±50mV to ±20V. The excellent signal integrity, with less than 150 microvolts RMS noise and –50dB harmonic distortion, makes it suitable for a wide range of analogue and digital applications. The built-in signal source can act as a standard signal generator (sine, square, triangle and others) with programmable sweep or as a 12-bit 1.5 MS/s full-function arbitrary waveform generator. Despite its small size, the two-channel scope has a comprehensive list of features as standard including an FFT spectrum analyser, 16K samples of segmented capture memory, math channels, automatic time-domain and frequency-domain measurements, colour persistence and XY display modes, and mask limit testing. Advanced digital triggering produces highly stable waveforms with accurate single-LSB threshold resolution. The serial decoding function (CAN bus, LIN bus, SPI, I2C, I2S, UART and more) presents results in tabular and colour-coded graphical formats, with powerful filtering, search and export options. The free software for Microsoft Windows 7, 8 and 10 runs on a PC and can be resized to use as much or as little of the screen as required. It is easy to print captured waveforms for use in reports, share files with colleagues, or export data for analysis.