[Radio Wrangler]

Hameg scopes are very reputable. It's the brand name used by Rohde & Schwarz of Munich, a very well respected company and the big competitor of HP/Agilent/Keysight. As Ted says, they are well designed and made out of mostly standard parts.

The HM312 is a good basic scope, minimal fear-factor and will do an awful lot of work for you. Mention of a pair of probes suggests it's the HM312-8 model which has twin input channels which is a very useful advance on the basic model. If it's in good order, it's ideal for you.

You'll find on here that for a lot of people, a multimeter is their primary bit of test equipment. It's what they go probing with first. It's what they feel most comfortable with. They're cheaper in new prices, they look simpler, and if you worked in a service centre, you were largely limited to them, with one shared scope for special jobs. Cost was the real reason.

You'll also find on here a smaller number of people whose background was in research and development, where they were working on prototype equipment and problems that had never been seen before. You'll find these people use scopes as their 'eyes' and only switch to a meter when they need to know a voltage particularly accurately, or measure resistance.

Part of the difference came from the funding available, less from fear factor.

If you probe with a voltmeter, you get to see the mean DC voltage quite accurately, but don't see any other clues.

If you probe with a scope, you don't see voltages with anything like the accuracy of a meter, but you get enough for most things. hat you do get to see are any super-imposed signals, wanted ones and unwanted ones. You can see ripple on power supplies to hunt and kill hum problems, you can see spurious oscillations (the bane of Quad 303s) You can check TV waveforms, logic waveforms etc.

All told, YOU become a lot more versatile with a scope probe in your hand. Because you can see what's going on and not have to deduce it from spot voltage readings, it becomes easier for us to explain and for you to understand.

First you learn wow to set it up for a basic measurement, and from there on it's just a matter of acquiring tricks for special circumstances.

Together a multimeter and a scope are very complementary.

David