Getting The Most Out Of Your Oscilloscope: Setup

Figure 1: Choosing a effective sample rate is key
to seeing the finer details of a waveform

Today's real-time digital oscilloscopes are so packed with bells and whistles (or "features," if you prefer) that you can forget how to use many of them. In fact, you might not even realize some exist! But they're all there for a reason, and they're all useful, maybe even more so than you know. To that end, we'll take a tour of a typical Teledyne LeCroy oscilloscope's features and give you some pointers as to how, and when, you can best take advantage of them.

Don't Leave Oscilloscope Performance on the Table

Figure 1: In this screenshot, four signals are displayed
on a single grid. Each signal is only using
64 counts of its ADC, which amounts to 6-bit resolution.

As test and measurement companies add to their products' capabilities, digital oscilloscopes serve a larger and more sophisticated set of measurements as vendors have added to their capabilities. And even though many of those additions come at the behest of the user community, many oscilloscope users don't even scratch the surface of what their instrument can do.