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Concept
Oscilloscope
Summary
An oscilloscope (informally scope or O-scope) is a type of electronic test instrument that graphically displays varying voltages of one or more signals as a function of time. The main purpose is capture information on electrical signals for debugging, analysis, or characterization. The displayed waveform can then be analyzed for properties such as amplitude, frequency, rise time, time interval, distortion, and others. Originally, calculation of these values required manually measuring the waveform against the scales built into the screen of the instrument. Modern digital instruments may calculate and display these properties directly.
Oscilloscopes are used in the sciences, engineering, biomedical, automotive and the telecommunications industry. General-purpose instruments are used for maintenance of electronic equipment and laboratory work. Special-purpose oscilloscopes may be used to analyze an automotive ignition system or to display the waveform of the heartbeat as an electrocardiogram, for instance.
History of the oscilloscope
Early high-speed visualisations of electrical voltages were made with an electro-mechanical oscillograph. These gave valuable insights into high speed voltage changes, but had a very low frequency response, and were superseded by the oscilloscope which used a cathode ray tube (CRT) as its display element.
The Braun tube, forerunner of the CRT, was known in 1897, and in 1899 Jonathan Zenneck equipped it with beam-forming plates and a magnetic field for deflecting the trace, and this formed the basis of the CRT. Early cathode ray tubes had been applied experimentally to laboratory measurements as early as the 1920s, but suffered from poor stability of the vacuum and the cathode emitters. V. K. Zworykin described a permanently sealed, high-vacuum cathode ray tube with a thermionic emitter in 1931. This stable and reproducible component allowed General Radio to manufacture an oscilloscope that was usable outside a laboratory setting.
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