Hi group,
Sometimes I wonder about this... maybe the experts on here have some view on this ??
I mean, the brightness of the trace varies considérably depending on sweep speed, ranging from blinding at slow speed, to barely visible when at full speed + x10 mag turned on, so one has to constantly adjust the brightness control whilst working.
So, seeing as Tek was the leader in the scope world for decades, always finding ways to improve performance or usability, going to great effort to make nice user interfaces..... did they ever implement some kind of automatic brightness control, so that a use can just adjust the brightness level, and the scope would maintain that setting regardless of the sweep speed ??
I mean OK, would be a bit of a stretch for tube/valve scopes in the 50's/60's, but in the '80s where there were micro-controllers running the state of the art 2400 analog scopes back in the day, it might have been technically possible ?
I don't know... for example, Tek could determine experimentally, how much to vary the voltage on the CRT's grid that's responsible for brightness adjustement, to get a constant brightness, for every time base setting/sweep speed, for a given desired brightness level. then they could put that data in a little look up table. Then, when the user rotates the brightness control on the front panel, instead of the knob driving directly a pot on the CRT grid, it could instethe scope could look that up in the table, and do some basic linear interpolation between two points, when need be, then vary the PDA accordingly.
Vince