A general-purpose instrument, the scope measures analog and digital signals. Read the PDF version . As an engineering student, I had my first lesson in test equipment on an oscilloscope. That heavy box with its 500-kHz bandwidth was all I needed to measure the outputs of several sensors, comparators, and logic gates. Every engineering lab, production floor, and service shop has at least one scope.
Scopes take many forms.
The traditional bench scope resides not only on benches, but in ATE systems, too. Handheld scopes find use in field service and plant applications. PC plug-in cards may reside in an engineer's lab computer or in a production test system. External PC-connected scopes reside on lab benches, on production floors, and in field applications. Benchtop Scopes Bench scopes remain the most popular because of their versatility and stand-alone operation.