Fun things to do with an oscilloscope

Thread Starter

tom66

Joined May 9, 2009
2,595
If anyone has a scope, post something fun you can do with it (this is related to my oscillator challenge, which, by the way, nobody has yet beaten.)

In this case I have a digitising oscilloscope operating on 50 Hz mains. If I amplify the noise signature from the oscilloscope (about 20x) to get 250µV/div (4 screens, 2 divs per screen), I can see the oscilloscope's screen refresh rate - 60 Hz. The noise on this scope is remarkably low for a CRT based digital oscilloscope (375µVp-p). The trigger is sensitive enough to pick up the 80µV or so pulses in the analog side. See the attached image. I know this is the screen refresh rate and not the mains ripple in the power supply/voltage references because the scope is running on 50 Hz mains (maybe next time I will try and extract the mains ripple.)

I wanted to get XY mode working on it, but like many digital oscilloscopes XY mode doesn't work too well; the bandwidth is too limited. Lissajous figures are only possible up to a few kHz. My college has analog scopes in their labs, so it will be interesting to see how my use of the digital scopes' menus translates to all the dials - hopefully well...

Anybody else have any tricks?
 

Attachments

Top