Physics307L F09:People/Long/Oscilloscope

The Oscilloscope Lab was an exercise targeted towards learning how to use an Oscilloscope. I had no previous experience with one, so it was intimidating at first. In this lab, we used the Oscilloscope to measure periodic signals produced by the wavetek function generator. After getting acquainted with both the function generator and the oscilloscope, we took a few measurements of the signal voltage using a variety of techniques. The "measure function" technique on the oscilloscope seemed to be most accurate. One of the main goals of the lab was to calculate the RC constant for a signal, we arrived at 25.5 milliseconds. For different signals, there are different trigger types, the trigger is a way "to display events with unchanging or slowly (visibly) changing waveforms", (from wikipedia). For our purposes, we mostly used the rising edge trigger, which triggers a pulse whenever the rising voltage reaches a certain level. Finally we explored AC coupling which is a useful feature of the Oscilloscope in which the DC component of a signal is removed on the display, this is advantageous because the DC component can offset the signal, removing this offset provides for a much clearer signal, for better measurements. This lab should prove to be crucial, as I will be using the oscilloscope for more labs to come. I'd like to acknowledge my partner, Tom Mahony, we made a good team and he helped explain some of the more difficult concepts well. For more detailed information on our data, see my lab notebook