Sweep Duration Research Articles

Electronic Tracing of Oscilloscope Displays

An electronic circuit is described which permits the direct recording of a repetitive high-frequency signal shown on the screen of a CRO by a common pen recorder. This is achieved by the intermittent connection of a condenser through a special type of gate to the Y-deflection plates of the CRO, the gate being opened only during a very short time at a delay time Δt after the X-sweep initiation. In this way the condenser is charged proportionally to the signal amplitude at the time Δt. If the voltage of this condenser is registered by a pen recorder, an exact copy of the signal displayed on the CRO screen will be obtained if Δt is slowly varied from zero to maximum sweep duration.