The scope probe has a GROUND clip. What did you do with it?

Hi again. That's one of the things tied to the breadboard bus. It's clipped to a short jumper on there.

 

Ok. Next question.
What are you using to power your chips?
Have you looked at the power supply rail with the scope?
Do you have 10μF electrolytic capacitor and 0.1μF ceramic capacitor across the power supply rails?

 

MrChips-

It's all coming from an HP6205C bench supply. Looking at the supply now, it's pretty clean if I disconnect the two chips (7404 oscillator & 74HC14 gates), but there's quite a bit of noise added as each one is reconnected. Don't know if I'm doing things right, but it almost looks like over a half volt of ripple on the supply when they're both up and running.

I'll see what I can do with some bypass caps. Can the unused pins of those two ICs here be safely left open, or could that add noise?

Thanks!

 

I did get some of that ripple down adding the bypass caps to both chips, but I'm not sure if it was just from moving jumper wires around. Unfortunately, my wave output from that crystal circuit looks roughly like it did before.

 

MrChips-

I think you were onto something with the probe stuff. I disconnected and moved the probe and some wires around and it snapped into something much nicer looking (attached picture). That overshoot thing can be tamed down with the scope's filters, but I'm not sure it would matter to whatever I sent the signal to anyhow.

I guess these high frequency types don't approve of my messy workspace.

- Much Appreciated!