This topic is a divergence branch off of the Music_and_the_PcLab2000/PCSGU250 Thread.
In the Music thread, molekuul suggested that ARTA might be better for my application. Right now I am investigating rather ARTA is better than Velleman’s PcLab2000 or not.
Should I buy ARTA or should I buy both?
On my first evaluation, I sense that ARTA is a competitor to PcLab, at least in the audio frequencies. Also PcLab’s Oscilloscope has a lot better user interface, but ARTA author is a better programmer than Velleman’s Engineers. ARTA has better documentation.
ARTA is only software, a single program and the Demo can be downloaded for free. ARTA requires third party hardware to do anything useful. Also ARTA cost 79 Euro for the full program; so it is not really free.
I already own Velleman’s PCSGU250, I bought it from MCM Electronics in April 2013. MCM was blowing them out as MCM thought they were obsolete! Dumb, the things that will run under MS Windows 95, 98, 2000 and XP are very important to me. I keep my old motherboards and convert them into bench test equipment.
So what I really bought the PCSGU250 for is the Spectrum Analyzer. It does almost everything I want. I am just a little unhappy with the PCSGU250’s documentation (I haven’t found any yet) and I would like an App for a “water falls” display. Would I pay for this “water falls” App? Yes. How much would I be willing to pay? That depends. Anything else? Well I would like to be able to pass data files from the Oscilloscope to the Spectrum Analyzer better, to have the Transit Analyzer take more data points and put them in a file that would be readable by the Spectrum Analyzer. Maybe the PCSGU250/Pc2000 can do this, I just have not found out how to do it yet.
Joe