Why Do We Share Oscilloscopes But Buy Textbooks?
Students should have access to their own measurement instruments rather than sharing equipment, especially in universities with higher tuition costs. We need to buy a secondhand iClicker and textbooks for each class, but we have to share the lab's $2000 oscilloscope when a personal one costs just $200. Another point of owning our instruments is that we can grow into it. Even after a semester of lab classes, the oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers still feel foreign to me. As I am fortunate to own my own equipment, I have seen myself grown into them. My dad bought me an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and didn't teach me very much how to use it. But as I carry it around with me, I would think about it in the back of my mind and see if it can solve my current problem in my projects. 2 years after I got it, I remembered it, "don't my oscilloscope have a logic analyzer function?". And it was very instrumental in the debugging of my project. Similarly, my $400 Owon 3-in-1 ...