Physics307L F09:People/Callow/Oscilloscope

Links to lab notebook and procedure used
The procedures used in this lab may be found here. Oscilloscope lab

The measurements and notes I took may be found here. Oscilloscope lab notebook day 1

Only one day of notes was recorded for this lab.

Purpose of the lab
The main goal of the lab was to become comfortable using an oscilloscope and its different settings to take measurements.

Summary of my data
The fall time found using the cursors was 51ms and using measure was 52.76ms. The two methods are fairly close so are likely reliable. From this I found the RC constant to be

RC = T/2.197 = .5276 ms/2.197 = .2401 seconds or 24.01ms.

What I learned
From this lab I learned a lot about how to view and take measurements using an oscilloscope and the function generator. At the beginning I had almost no experience with either and by the end was able to navigate through all the menus and measurement options fairly quickly. Though this lab was more to become comfortable with the equipment, if doing a similar process I would try moving around on the waves displayed to see how much the measure function of the oscilloscope varies to find places to reduce error.

Also I if doing the lab again I'd take more pictures as some pictures of the oscilloscope screen while taking measurements would have been nice but at the time didn't think to get any. These could have helped show the error in measure if the screen isn't set up correctly for the measurement of fall time. In future labs it'll probably just be a good idea to take as many pictures as possible.