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Review: Protek 860, part 2 of 2
June 1, 2007

Click here for part 1 of this product review
(click here for the introduction to this series of reviews of four handheld oscilloscopes)

DMM
Pressing the Meter button on the Protek 860 gets you a blank screen with three soft-key options: Volt Meter, Ohm meter, and Aux Meter. Pressing the Aux Meter (F3) key brings up choices for temperature, current, humidity, and pressure. For the volt meter, you can choose from AC/DC, min/max, and relative measurements. To return to other meter functions, you must press the meter button, which brings you to the top of the meter menu; there’s no “back” button. Pressing the ohm-meter button gives you resistance, diode, continuity, and capacitance measurements. You make your selection by repeatedly pressing the F1 key. The wheel doesn’t let you select from this pop-up menu. It should (Agilent the same),I wouldn’t have expected the find capacitance buried under ohms. You also get min/max and relative measurements. Agilent and Protek DMM functions are idtentical. Only difference is the screen when you enter DMM mode. Agilent screen describes the meter functions. Protek screen in blank.

Wavelink Software

The software didn’t immediately work. During install, I saw a message saying that the software had not been tested for Windows compatibility. I went ahead with the install anyway. Install went OK but I had to reboot once. That’s not unusual when installing software, but the system should have told me.

The Wavelink software emulates the 860’s buttons and menus (see image). It uses three virtual buttons to emulate the instrument’s wheel. They looked grayed out, but functioned anyway. The oscilloscope operates through software just as it does with the buttons. When under software control, the 860’s physical buttons are nonfunctional. They returned to functional when I clicked on the virtual power button.

When I wanted to save data I went to the Wavelink menu and selected “Save As.” Wavelink produced a “Visual C++ Debug Assertion Failure” message and shut down. I restarted Wavelink and then was able to save an image of the screen.

I used the data button to capture data and export it to a text file, but I still received the same C++ error message. I had to click Ignore three times. The 860F saves data in hex format, that’s not easy to import into Excel. The data windows give three columns (hex, dec, bin) but will export hex only. I needed decimal because my Excel installation doesn’t have the hex2dec function.

Protek’s 860 handheld oscilloscope had problems. The sticky power button was the most significant. I like that you can install any AA batteries, and the screen is easy to see outdoors. The PC Software needs work, though.

Posted by Martin Rowe on June 1, 2007 | Comments (0)