Well, another day closer to my scope! Me...Clock-watching??? You bet I am!
I am in the doghouse now anyway. We are going to be a bit short of food until tomorrow. Do you need three guesses who got so carried away with a scope, that he completely forgot to place an order for food? Oops.
IDEngineer, that is a wonderful story. When I was 11 my school had an open day where parents came along. In the physics lab I spotted my first ever real oscilloscope. All the others were on TV. Yes, it was the same thing, a microphone plugged into it. Ratty old thing it was really, the wire for the microphone had broken at the connector and everything was held together by black insulating tape.
I never thought about this before, but watching all of those "Open University" programmes in Britain as a child must have had some effect on me, because I remember looking at all of those thin green lines on the screen and wondering how the scope decided to put them there? What I was seeing was lots of overlayed green lines and wondering if each one was the outer edge of some frequency band or something like that? What I failed to appreciate was that I was seeing the outer envelope of my whole voice, but because it was free-running and not triggering off a repeating part of the signal, it just kept writing green lines over each other making it look like many traces.
When I first got into electronics, I think a roughly comparable scope to this was over ten grand? Might have had more bandwidth, but did not have all the functions like math. It is staggering how much you get now for the money. These scopes seem to be at the top of the sweet spot? Because even small improvements from this level seem to cost you ever larger chunks of money.
I remember an article about an HP oscilloscope with an unimaginable price tag (about $250,000 in the 80s I think), but what got everyone's attention was that people were questioning that it seemed to be being shown displaying a signal that was faster than light. They had to explain that the "x5" was on, and that it was not breaking any laws. What I took away from that was that we now had scopes that can measure to a significant part of C. Even now I find that staggering.
My old DM53 had the mounts for a Polaroid camera on it! Never did get the camera as the film was no longer being made as far as I knew. Even so, the phosphor was pretty impressive at being able to hold a signal for about 40 minutes.
Rhb, mechanical engineering is something I love also. Sadly now I live in an apartment, so my forge, lathe and anvil had to go. I miss 'em.