I Got An Oscilloscope! Now What Do I Do With It? 

I’m surprised that you didn’t know you have a ham following, the sorta stuff you do is what our hobby is all about even if you don’t get on the air. You’re one of my favourite RU-vid channels as a ham operator.

Oh yeah us radio enthusiasts love you. I swear I've gotten more people into Ham just by sending them your SDR videos. Keep up the great work!

This man is about to be Scoping ALL of the Oscillo's

Bought one in 1985 for about $460 after graduating from engineering school. Still have it, never used it once.

Just so you know my black saveitforparts t-shirt is now my official going-to-town shirt. Thanks for another cool video.

LOL "smells like its using up its lifespan" Always love the humor! Thanks for another vid!

In my lab we use an oscilloscope to do gamma ray spectroscopy with scintillators. Basically the peak voltage reached by the photomultipler is proportional to the energy of the gamma ray and I scan each waveform output by the trigger for the peak and also integrate over the signal. A good oscilloscope and handwritten software can replace an entire data acquisition crate if one is good enough. And the robustness of the data by having a full waveform allowed me to remove noise signals since they have a different shape and timing. Oscilloscopes are awesome!

That has to be the absolute cutest Oscilloscope I have ever scene. Nice pickup!

If you decide you want to try a more advanced scope but still a bit retro - I have two Tektronics scopes from the 70s or 80s. Still analog. Now-defunct local company NCS/Scantron engineers used them to diagnose their scanner products. If you want more info let me know. I never got around to learning and I would be happy to pass one or both on for free to someone who will use them.

My first oscilloscope was a (1947!) TekTronix 512. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I was 13, and my dad brought it home from the electronics department of the museum where he worked. This was around 1976, so that scope should itself have been in a museum! But it was useful to me for many years after that. Weighed about 30kg as I recall. I used it for debugging my first 8080 computer build, and a number of other projects. Anywhere were you have electronic signals other than DC, an oscilloscope can help you check them to make sure they're doing what you expect. Modern scopes are often multi-channel, have "cursors" for measuring voltage and frequency, have various trigger modes, etc. No electronics lab in the last 70 years has existed without a 'scope or three on-hand.

One of the main uses for an oscilloscope is to take measurements in the analog domain. Even digital oscilloscopes tend to be showing you what's going on with analog signals. But there's a couple of things you need to take measurements. 1) the scope needs to be calibrated, and 2) you need a graticule, which is an overlay of grid lines over the display. With these features, you can set the horizontal sweep to some calibrated value, say 5ms/div. In such a case, the grid lines are 5ms each and you can, for example, see what time elapses between interest points in the input waveform, such as the peaks of sinewaves. Also, vertical grid lines and vertical calibration allows you to measure signal amplitudes, as the vertical amplifier should have volts/div settings, so you can set it to .1 v/div and count grid lines between the bottom and top of a waveform in order to see what the signal's amplitude is. Trigger circutry was developed by Tektronix in I think the 1950s, so earlier scopes aren't going to have trigger circuits, though they may have synchronization circuts that accomplish a similar function but more crudely. Trigger circuits allow you to cause the horizontal sweep to wait until the input signal gets to a certain value, and makes it easier to see less frequent signals, or pick trigger points on more complex signals in order to stabilize the display.

That slowly moving sine wave looks beutifully hypnotic. And you can use oscilloscopes to check on your equipment in case of a malfuntion.

The logo for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation was based on a Oscilloscope.

That would be good for looking at audio & voice signals. Philco was famous for making some really unusual & weird looking TV's in the late 1950's like the Tandem Predicta.

Input 60 cycle into both horizontal and vertical to see a circle.

Back in high-school I took an old color tv and fed the outputs from a stereo record player and deconverged the color guns which made it kind of like an oscilloscope with 3 pulsing wild circles.

They are interesting if you have a use for one.

You need to get you a cheap Chinese oscilloscope that has triggers, grids for voltage and time... this thing is TOO basic.

fantastic device as ever - as a radio amateur i'd be interested in seeing the output of the mains power before and after the AC filter i have between my mains power and DC power supply. Great video as ever, and a lovely piece of kit !

I'd suggest for your next scope to get at least one with 2 channels. That way you can make measurements at 2 locations on a PCB simultaneously. You can examine the input of a signal and see what happens with the optput.

You can find portable analog, solid state scopes with more advanced features like triggering modes and muliple channels made by companies like Tektronix. Make sure the seller confirmes that if it runs on a battery pack it hasn't leaked since the 80s. I recommend sticking with analog for beginners as digital scopes only really teach you about menus (also if you overload and break it with the signal it's at least possible to repair unlike most digital scopes).

Think of an oscilloscope as the next step up from a voltmeter, or a voltmeter that graphs over time. You can even use one as a voltmeter, but I've only done that in a pinch when I misplaced my meter. I couldn't recommend getting an old scope these days, given what you can get in a cheap modern scope. Your projects keep intersecting with territory where a scope can paint a picture rather than giving you a number and a picture can be worth more than 1000 words when describing what a circuit is doing. The important part here is that you apparently understand a scope is in your future. Lol. I recently picked up a portable 170 MHz bandwidth unit from Owon which is more useful than any scope I had in the 80s, but the cheap desktop units today can't be beat.

The Hitachi V-212 is a great analog oscilloscope to learn on. 2 channels, 20MHz bandwidth, X-Y mode (for that oscilloscope music video you found), and all the standard trigger options.

Hook up to your garage eye sensor. Interesting wave there and easy compatible voltage

Enjoying your channel. I picked up one of these from eBay to restore just a few months ago. Looks to be a fun restoration - and you picked a fun one to work with. Subscribed. Cheers!

I was just looking at them, just this week, to buy in the future

Sheesh that scope is the coolest !!!

Might need capacitors replaced if the previous owner has not. I have found newer 10 to 30 mhz scopes from free to $20. I recently gave one away to a highschool student.

I have a cheapo 2 channel usb scope and it has helped me a lot. So many things happen faster than a voltmeter can react, and without a scope it will be invisble to you. When something isn't working I put the scope on it and I often see things I didn't even expect - bad regulation, ringing, noise from another part of the circuit... It's great. But since it needs a computer it isn't very portable.

I found it interesting that the manual has instructions for how to make grid overlay for the display. You are supposed to use a disc of mica or celluloid (good luck..ax man?) and scratch the lines with a scribe. Of course today, if you have access to a laser printer and a clear mylar sheet, you should be able make one pretty easily.

Awesome. You need a Sine Wave generator for your oscilloscope.

NAWWWW, that thing is SO CUTE! Like most complex things, there is alot of knobs and switches that you generally dont use. unless you reallly need to. I wouldnt think a 1940's unit would be the best thing to learn on however. in the age of digital, LCD 'CROs', the big old analogue ones can be had pretty cheap. and I think they look way cooler. Its bulk never bothered me, as I prefer my monitor higher up, so I just replaced the stack of yellow pages with the CRO... Some things I find a scope most useful for: if you have a dodgy PSU, It can read just fine on a multimeter (and the feedback circuit). but if you have bad regulation or a fussy SMPS, it can make noise on your power which can cause all sort of havoc. weird glitchy results, strange intermittent faults, that sort of thing. your multimeter might show a perfect 5v, but the PSU is actually trash (probably a bad cap or diode). If your dealing with Serial data, a 'Digital Storage Oscilloscope, DSO' can be really handy, it will capture and store the waveform, so you can 'scrub' through it like a video editor, and often compare multiple channels. invaluable if your questioning 'is my widget actually putting out valid data?' can quickly show you if your signal may be inverted, a lower/higher voltage than expected, not a clean waveform, that sort of thing. the really clever ones can actually interpret ASCII or other encoding. Very useful if your trying to get thing A to talk to Thing B. Obviously measuring frequencies. of course there are digital widgets that can do that, but that meat potato between your ears can do alot of post processing and work out exactly what you want to look for. ie, you can pretty easily see multiple frequencies at once, and just measure the one that you want. If your trying to get filters to work, invaluable. or any other resonant circuit for that matter. And the obvious application, they look COOL. When I was an electronic tech, when I first started I clawed out an old tektronics Scope from under the stairs and over the years it became part of my battlestation. It took about 30min to warm up enough to give accurate readings, and some of the knobs were alligator clips. Id wired the whole desk into one main switch, so PSU, Iron, Scope, PC monitor, audio amp, was on one RCD protected circuit (so I could pop breakers without knocking over the whole business... mostly... they didnt like that). Get in, hit the lights and workstation, make a coffee, have some banter, figure the days plan, and by then it was cooking. but I didnt want to turn the CRO off, cos it always gave weird results when cold. so I just hooked it up to the HiFi system and let it dance along to the music. Milkdrop is cool and all, but a CRO just Groovin' in the corner of the room. thats just cool (even if there was a very practical reason)

The hiccup in the waveform is crossover distortion. For vector graphics the scope needs x y and z axis, the z is for blanking.

Meanwhile, a cat just beams itself into the room.

Great choice for a first scope given the vintage factor, but it appears to need a re-cap and recalibration. The response looks pretty out of linear. That shows you the most basic of basic and when you want more, there are so many good, cheap scopes these days. Anything from Owon, or Rigol, or Siglent will do you great when you want a more advanced unit.

When measuring the power banks you should change the trigger from Line or 60HZ which is freq of AC power to maybe internal. The sign wave from the power company may be offset from the power banks causing the odd readout.

I recently got an Agilent 54622D, it's a lovely digital scope with a green phosphor CRT. I don't have much experience with more recent scopes, but this one has really responsive input, the knobs feel like analog controls! They even have acceleration for doing large adjustments with a quick flick of the dial, and then more precise control when going slower. For me, the 16-bit logic analyzer has already helped me revive one ancient computer (an Apple IIe), so I find that quite useful as well.

I use mine for monitoring timing signals on my microprocessors. That one is an interesting antique. Maybe too simple to learn on. Make a Spirograph art project maybe?

These waterman scopes are pretty good, I have slightly more advanced model (S-11-A) with things like manual sync controls and AC/DC modes. They'll last just fine provided they have had their caps replaced and you keep the bightness down to not burn up the CRT. They originally came with a leather carrying case with a shoulder strap for lugging it.

Hm 60hrtz, that explains the fast oscillating shocks I got from unhooking a ceiling light today 😅

Look in to analog discovery. It's a student oscilloscope and signal generator. It's more then $40 but I see used ones on ebay.

YES bro. Your channel introduced me to the wonders of amateur radio astronomy but I'm also CRT / Oscilloscope guy. Would love to see you dive deeper into this subject

OMG this oscillo looks so cool

What a cute little unit, glad to see it getting some real use. for your hack-y test leads, I recommend some flexible coax to reduce noise. Think of it as "ground" rather than the negative lead on a multimeter, so you'd connect it to mains earth and the positive to hot. It's also a safety precaution to prevent ground loops, because on most scopes the ground lead is directly tied to mains earth.

Congratulations. That’s a beautiful little guy. I was doing City & Guilds “Transmission Systems” in the mid 80’s when I first got hands on with a scope. I could never imagine owning one back then. These days I have not use for it but I would still love to own one. I’m daft like that. 😂

I love old US made Philco stuff! Even in the Ford/TV era, they ruled!

Squiggly lines are cool 😎

Servo Waves might be interesting too

I found someone selling two identical small round Oscilloscopes, I wanted to buy them and use them as visual outputs on a jukebox

A beautiful old oscilloscope; the company also manufactured vacuum tubes. It's nice that it still works. If an oscilloscope has X, Y, Z inputs, it could be used in the past to display television images.

A fun beginning for your adventure this door opens.

I bet Keysight Technologies would love to sponsor you but I know you like to reuse old stuff, maybe they’ve got old models sitting on a workbench somewhere. Maybe they can pull enough components to build one out of the scrap bin… their online presentations are pretty good and I bet they’d like you to talk on one of them.

The actual frequency coming out of the wall can actually vary from about 59 to 61 hz. edit: it's probably closer to about 59.9 to 60.1

I love old scopes but have to admit to do electronics a little easier these days the digital scopes have a lot of information, its a lot harder to work out on a old analog scope , to me viewing a video signal a CRT is so much better it still and has this over a digital version ...I am glad you got one to start off with ,to do electronic without a scope you are blind not being able to test and see what's happening in your circuits . Looking at what is expected a sinewave from a mains transformer its a little wonky ...I can see your interest in all this believe me you did a good thing need a scope doing electronics !

I feel for you on the oscilloscope.

Nice video, man! Not only is tube equipment awesome, but this very old one still works. My tube experience is modern tube guitar amps. It rocks that you're always doing different things on your channel.

While this is a very interesting oscilloscope from a historic perspective that is still useful in some cases it is very limited compared to a newer model. The ability of a digital oscilloscope to capture events that don't repeat frequently is very useful in many cases, especially in projects that includes e.g. mechanical components. Given that you work on different projects at different locations I think a basic handheld oscilloscope with built in multimeter and signal generator would be good. I have an OWON HDS2102S that i find useful. The slightly slower OWON HDS272S cost about 150 usd and I think you would find it useful. It has some limitations but it works for many cases. Given that it is the size of a multimeter and contains a multimeter makes it likely that you have it with you when you need it. You get a better oscilloscope for the same cost if you go with a USB oscilloscope but then you need to bring a laptop and it is not as convenient. There is also cheaper handhold versions but they are often not as good.

I love the consistency of having a cup of tea slowly go down as the video progresses.

I'm kind of in the same boat as you are. My son found a tektronics 2235 oscilloscope at a scrap yard he worked at. I got it all cleaned up (it's in remarkable condition) and played with it a little, but now I don't know what to do with it next.

I've also found oscilloscopes super cool, but no idea what I'd do with them haha

What a shame you didn't get it to show oscilloscope music. I have always wanted a oscilloscope but never got one. You should have great fun with yours.

Cute little scope. I really like it. But without proper triggering it has very limited use. Also, it distorts too much to be useful for any kind of measurement. TBH, your typical, entry level, digital, desktop scope is about the same size and usually has 2 channels, 100-200 MHz bandwidth, all the crazy triggers and such, memory, FFT, protocol decoder, larger display and still costs very little (about 200 usd for a Hantek, OWON or something like that). Though, I still prefer to use analog one for certain applications, which include radio stuff. But proper analog scopes tend to be rather large and heavy.

Your sine wave from the battery unit is off frequency slightly and so the waveform is rolling.

Thats a nice collectors piece

If only we were all so realistic about stuff we all buy … 😂😂 That’s also a good way to limit clutter to some extent and spending . “Might get used once or twice as a novelty and then thrown in the back of the closet somewhere “ Thanks for the video and also keep saving things for parts . From a fellow tinkerer 😁

Most pre 70s only go up to about 1 or 3 mhz. I got an mid 90s HP 54610a that goes to 500mhz there about $250 on eBay. Mostly I use the HP to check other gears frequency. And the old one's are nice because there very hard to damage.

Great vid! I remember seeing these in old scifi shows and always wondered what are oscilloscopes used for. Please do another vid if you learn more about their uses 👍

try anything made by tektronix

I had a very similar scope years ago in the 70's its great for making a Lissajous pattern I would take and hook up the X axis to the left stereo channel and hook up the Y input to the Right channel and watch the different patterns. have fun enjoy

Very nice. I recommend a scope with a trigger function. It is useful for hardware hacking in case you ever get into that so would be a good future proof. Having at least 2 channels is also helpful in case you for example want to see how a clock signal relates to another signal synced by it.

DC current wave check, pls!!

More fun than a barrel of fermented herring, but not really a useful thing. For about that much you could have gotten a pretty good little Zeeweii that you can actually use as an oscilloscope.

I highly recommend getting one of those Tektronix analog oscilloscopes, a Tektronix 545 for example. They work great, have a ton of value for the price and most importantly you will learn a LOT about how to use scopes with one of those. It would definitley suit you better than one of those cheap chinese mikrocontroller kit scopes, they're just a pain to work with, very limited in capabilities and you learn next to nothing using them.

Time domain reflectometry (measuring length of cables, checking for breaks or shorts) is my favourite oscilloscope use. Can be done with only a few components too. Might not work so good with your basic unit though! More info here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-z6UJPqQYzNc.htmlsi=Mr05jpKfy5hrZTut 8:00 - Maybe your mains actually does looks that ;-) I put my modern unit across the mains some time ago and that didn’t go well at all.

ive always wanted one

I would also like to know what to do with mine - It's a big one and never touched it since I satisfied a burning desire to own one :P

I bought one of those single-board oscilloscopes in the acrylic case from wish but I only got the case and they gave my money back. Still haven’t used an oscilloscope since college…

What happens when you hook the unit up to the cats???

A foreign student ask: "Why do you say: "Oscillator" when you say goodbye to your friend? After a moment I realized he heard me say: "I'll see you later!" Now we say: "Oscillator."

Holy shit, your first oscilloscope is basically the same one my first one was. lol

There was a military version of that called the OS-8.

you will want more of them! like eating peanuts!

Might be useful for troubleshooting dc model railways but thats all I can think off the top of my head

"off gassing and giving me cancer" Macabe, but made me laugh. What does that say about me?

The Outer Limits intro

you're getting there , electronics is amazing the smell is the tubes get really hot and burn off hair and dust the magnet adjust will make it look better there's another i suggest to ppl youtuber called RobertMurraySmith thinkingntinkering he will show u some cool things about electronics and chemistry he is very intellegent i used one kind of like that in electronics class to fine tune circuits and like fix the tone im my guitar amp it visualizes the waveform a lot of new synthesizer keyboards have one on the screen so u can " see" how it sounds

repairs. you can use it to check signal lines on your "i bought this but there is no manual" devices. and power. that particular system might not give you entirely accurate diagnostic values but typically the display is used for demonstrative diagnostics like "Yes, it IS wiggling up and down" or "No, it is tied to ground/pulled high" or as you have shown here "the shape of this signal is n over time" as opposed to more mathematical applications. Is a devices CPU actually starting up or is the device halted. Scope can tell you. Does the signal make it to the external plug or is the chip dead? Job for a scope. Are the logic levels roughly in a non insane ballpark or is something really obviously woefully wrong ( voltages just being held at some middling level, or lacking sufficient volatic deflection to register an edge )... Scope would be nice. And a bunch more. Mainy related around "I have NO CLUE what this device here even does / expects / transmits / insert any doing word here " It's like a logic probe, a multimeter, frequency counter, visual data analog, Lissajous figure generator. and assuming you have two channels phase meter, A spectrum analyzer, even just a "Time Interval Analyser" where you need to observes timing differences between signals. fancy ones are great for logging and complex channel maths blah blah - but a lot of the time just a quick and dirty visual way to see "ARE WE THERE YET?" is what 40 bucks got you

Gabe, That is a basic oscilloscope that you have. But, if you get a decent dual scan digital 100 Mhz scope from eBay, you will grow to love the thing. You can do a lot with a good scope. You can measure frequency, voltage, and a number of math functions for wave analysis.

Wish I knew you were in Buffalo!

Check out the cam sensor on you car.

Neat!

Make a scope clock

Think of it as a voltmeter, with a very accurate clock. It just measures voltage over time. Edit: I have a 1980s Panasonic two channel analogue oscilloscope which is all yours if you pay for the postage. Unfortunately for you, I'm in the UK, and it would be cheaper for you to buy a brand new digital scope. It weighs a ton.

I click like on your videos even before I watch them 👍

At 8:13 That old radio smell is the asbestos burning of the cloth covered wires inside the unit witch is bad for health.😁😁😁😁

Philco - what a 1940's name!.. 😀

Adrians digital bacement does a few reviews of really cheep scopes that will be way more featured and useful for what you would want a scope for. Using i don't know exactly what you would use a scope for, as most of your radio projects can be captured with a sdr. But when you need it it's extremely useful. You can use a scope with fft to align antennas. I beleve it would be more useful if you where transmitting.

Crazy grin on your face as you showed us your new toy. What you learned from it is worth far more than the forty dollars you paid. Keep wondering

They did have digital technology and logic back then: it was implemented with relays, but very slow. And of course, people are still playing with them today, especially on RU-vid.

That drifting is because there is no trigger on the scope