Oscilloscopes: A Manual for Students, Engineers, and Scientists

by David Herres
Springer, 2020, 267 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

his book is intended to tell you how to use an oscilloscope. For that, it's only marginally useful: even though it's only five years old, the old 8-bit oscilloscopes it covers (Tektronix MDO3104 and TDS6804B) are long out of production. Its main value is to tell you what features are important to help you understand why you bought the wrong one.

Should you have bought one with an arbitrary waveform generator? Did you need a passive, differential, active, or current probe? Which was better: a PC-oscil­lo­scope, which can lock you into a specific version of Windows, or a free-standing one, which is less cumbersome but more expensive? What other equipment, like special cables, do you need? How many channels and what bandwidth? Is 12 bit resolution enough? What protocols do you need to decode? Or should you have bought a spectrum analyzer or network analyzer instead? Depending on your application, you might find that the oscilloscope is the cheapest or the most expensive item in your budget. The specs will likely inflate once you start using it and think of new things to measure.

For applications, this book won't help. The only application given is how to test a transistor without desoldering it. In many cases, you'll need some interface stuff to get a usable signal. For instance, to measure light with a photodiode you'd probably need a transimpedance amplifier to see anything. Including this sort of information would have made the book a lot more useful.

Where it does help is to get you oriented about things like input impedance, bandwidth, trigger and math modes, and basic signal processing concepts. And there are helpful tips to help you avoid creating a ‘shower of sparks,’ like never trying to measure mains current, never taking it apart, and not plugging in a demo board to the wrong port. Just read this before, before, before you buy something.

feb 22, 2025