No problem :) Anyway, the point was that you can find the weirdest stuff on ebay, even ridiculously high end stuff from a couple of years ago. And of course $165K is still a fairly large chunk of cash for a second hand scope (to put it mildly) but it's about 10% of what it originally sold for.

Thanks. A random question this makes me think of: I've had "get an oscilloscope" on the one-day queue for quite a while, and I might be looking at actually being able to get one at last. For someone trying to balance a) understanding how not to blow it up, b) understanding how not to blow up what I'm poking at, and c) wrangling the newfound ability to MeAsUrE eVeRyThInG ("forget sleep, what does *that* trace do????")... I'm ultimately going to prefer (the confidence boost of) starting with a scope cheap enough to blow up instead of nuking my {computer, phone, AC outlet, USB charger, ebike charge circuit, FPGA devkit, ...} - but at the same time I'll definitely want to play with LVDS, MIPI, low-rate serdes stuff too, etc. All while I have exactly zero formal understanding of the basics >:D (hence the "blow up the scope first" bit...).

I guess I wonder if there's a reconcilable Venn diagram of viability somewhere in there, and if there is, what it might look like. (I think I'm looking at the oscilloscope as a C compiler, and electronics as Spicy Assembly xD)