I was thinking of picking up an oscilloscope to get back into old electronics work. It's been years since I've used one, so my experience is with the old Tektronics models from the 70's and 80's. These things still go for $400-$500 on ebay, are big, heavy, have high shipping charges, and there's no way to tell if they're properly calibrated or not before purchase.

Does anyone have any experience with the newer digital models? There seems to be a lot of lower priced ones now that would be suitable for older, low frequency signals. Are they any good though? I was hoping to stay under the $300 range, which you'd think would be attainable for something to work on 30 year old hardware..

Get the small portable DSO's. Instek and other Chinese brands are just fine. You don't need much for speed if you are just doing drive alignments, but splurge the little extra to get the best unit in your budget for future needs.

I own these units, plus several HP analog scopes and a couple of high end Agilent 40Ghz spectrum analyzers:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/GW-Ins...1c1cba0fcf

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Hantek...58928e54ae

This would even work in a pinch for drive alignments:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Portab...2318394653