Hantek HT8050 Oscilloscope Probe High Voltage Differential Probe, 50MHZ Bandwidth

I was a bit disappointed when learning that the probe didn’t have a built-in provision to be powered by plain old alkaline batteries, such as “AA” or a “9V”. It makes the probe more difficult to use for field work, or when eliminating a “potential” source of noise from the power supply in precision measurements. Battery operation also is safer than trusting the isolation spec of the cheap power supplies on the market in higher voltage primary measurements. If you are measuring something on the mains, particularly in a CAT-3 or worse environment, then battery operation should be an essential feature for a differential voltage probe. However, it works as advertised. The lack of a battery provision isn’t indicated on the Hantek website either. For this price, it had to be lacking something. I’ll personally be making a small plastic battery box with an array of AA’s that I’ll velcro to the back of the probe and utilize the barrel connector. I don’t believe in Lithium Ion batteries with DC/DC converters for this application over plain old alkaline cells due to the noise, safety, or reliability issues that it may introduce for field work. I’m blessed to have a Lithium Ion power bank for charging phones, but it radiates enough noise to pollute a critical measurement in the field. Plus if your Lithium Ion dies in the field, you gotta stop work to find a source to charge it. If alkaline cells expire, it takes 1-min to change them out.

The probe works great on hot chassis devices. I do not like the test leads as they are pretty large and hard to attach to smaller components. I know they need to isolate high voltages but they are just to bulky.