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Learning to use an oscilloscope and an old floppy drive

opalko

Hi folks, as my previous posts indicate, I am new to this stuff.image I bought a Siglent SDS1202X-E when it was on sale and have been trying to teach myself the basics of it (probably not very well).

 

As it is, I have an old Atari 810 disk drive (Tandon) that is not working and one of the things I keep hearing is to test the drive speed.  The field service manual for the drive says:

Set Frequency Counter Controls to the following settings:

A. 10k Resolution or 1 Second Sample Time

B. X1 attenuation or Maximum sensitivity

C. X1 Probe (preferred)

When the frequency counter is properly adjusted, a 60.2 KHz reading should be seen on counter.


I guess the first question I should be asking is can I even use this scope to measure this?...

 

If I can, and I don't know if I am doing it correctly, I get what looks like varying frequency results without even adjusting the potentiometer that controls the drive speed.  When I hook everything up and hit "Measure", I get varying readings for the frequency as seen in screenshots below.  So,

  1. I am not doing something correctly with the scope (most likely) and/or
  2. I can't really use this scope to measure what needs to be measured (also likely) or
  3. the wild readings mean the potentiometer or something else is bad?

 

I will reiterate I am very new to this....

Thanks for any guidance on using this scope or repairing this drive...!

 

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Parents

  • Hi Robert,

     

    Once you have a feel of where your scope displays the X and Y information, i.e. time in millisec or microsec per division for the X-axis, and Volts or millivolts on the Y-axis, so that you can see if the signals are changing in the approximate time that you expect, and in the approximate voltage levels that you expect, then you'll feel a lot more comfortable with your 'scope (different 'scopes show the information in different places on the screen). Also, no signal is 100% perfect, so you'll see deviations like ripple or other effects, depending on how zoomed-in or how zoomed-out you are, on either the X or Y axis, or both.

    The automated measurements are useful when you are happy with what is represented on the screen (and sometimes the measurements rely on precisely what's on the screen rather that what's actually happening on the wire), and the measurements will provide you with the most confidence when you can back it up by also seeing on the screen approximately what you expect to see (or don't expect to see, in error conditions! - that will come with practice).

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  • Hi Robert,

     

    Once you have a feel of where your scope displays the X and Y information, i.e. time in millisec or microsec per division for the X-axis, and Volts or millivolts on the Y-axis, so that you can see if the signals are changing in the approximate time that you expect, and in the approximate voltage levels that you expect, then you'll feel a lot more comfortable with your 'scope (different 'scopes show the information in different places on the screen). Also, no signal is 100% perfect, so you'll see deviations like ripple or other effects, depending on how zoomed-in or how zoomed-out you are, on either the X or Y axis, or both.

    The automated measurements are useful when you are happy with what is represented on the screen (and sometimes the measurements rely on precisely what's on the screen rather that what's actually happening on the wire), and the measurements will provide you with the most confidence when you can back it up by also seeing on the screen approximately what you expect to see (or don't expect to see, in error conditions! - that will come with practice).

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