Hacked Hantek DSO2C10 AWG distortion problem - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / testgear

author: Sync0
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 02, 2025, 10:37:08 pm
content: Hello everybody, I'm new here. I got a Hantek DSO2C10 that I wanted to hack to access the waveform generator, so I opened it up, checked the mainboard and found it to be populated (it contained the relay, DAC and LMH67 op amp) then I followed the procedure in this forum to convert it to DSO2D15 and everything went well (first image). The AWG is now accessible with only one problem, the waves it generates are distorted beyond recognition.At first it seemed like the probe was not picking up anything until I increased the wave amplitude and decreased the vertical scale only to see a distorted vibrating sinusoid (third image). Since the sinusoids looked nested I tried increasing the time scale and found out that they indeed were nested inside a bigger looking sinusoid (fourth image) so I'm not sure what's going on. The probes are working & already compensated using the square wave output and I tried auto calibrating the oscilloscope but nothing changed.I also tried updating it from Hantek's website to the latest version which is, at the time of posting, SW 240326 and FW 3209 (I wasn't expecting it to also update the firmware yet it did), but the problem persists. If you're wondering what other generated waveforms look like, 5th image shows an exponential and 6th one is a square wave. You can see that they vaguely resemble what they should be but are all distorted and not even the correct amplitude.I'm not sure what the problem is and how to fix it so I'd like to know if anybody has a potential solution, and thanks for your time!

author: Grandchuck
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 03:13:41 pm
content: You are using an oscilloscope probe for the output cable of the generator? Try a BNC test cable if you can.

author: Sync0
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 03:22:56 pm
content: So an update, after a night has gone by I turned on my Hantek and found out that the weird distortion from yesterday was gone, but the problem of inaccurate amplitudes still exists. All waveforms are clean now but they're heavily attenuated, for example a 2.5Vpp generated sine wave when measured is actually just 30mVpp.Since the waveforms are now stable and measurable, I went ahead with the calibration mod because I thought maybe since the waveforms look good now it's just a problem of calibration. I followed the procedure and noted the minimum and maximum voltage values, wrote thecal_valuesfile (Unix format of course) and ran the mod, but got faced with an error (image).The Hantek DSO2000 Master Thread in this forum says that calibration will fail if the firmware version is wrong, so I ran the FW version change3209_B209file and updated FPGA FW version with the2024.03.26_fpga_3209file, then redid the calibration but it still gives the same error.I wonder what's wrong now, did I not update or change the FW version correctly? or is it just a weird transient like yesterday's problem. It would be very appreciated if someone can help me since I'm basically stuck now, and thanks for your time!

author: Sync0
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 03:25:41 pm
content: Thanks for the reply. I also thought it could be a probe problem yesterday so I will get a BNC cable as soon as I can and retest

author: Sync0
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: August 03, 2025, 07:23:36 pm
content: Update, I bought a BNC cable and yes the waveform is fully apparent! thanks Grandchuck!I also noticed that the logs file generated after the calibration mod contained an error of the values being too high, so with new hope that the calibration might work if I use instead these new values, I reran the mod and indeed it worked!So it turns out that the problem was the probes attenuating the signal way too much, to the point of noise overpowering it. Also when I removed the hook and used the probe directly, the signal appeared as fine as ever. I wonder why the hook was causing this issue.In any case, I'd like to thank this community for the fact that it made all this possible and open source, and also for its continued support of these issues. Thanks everybody!