Michael Dunn wrote:
BTW, can anyone point
out any real advantage to a scope like the 502 having dual beams...?
Scopes like the 502 and later 502A (and still later 5030) were used a lot in
biomedical research. They were cheaper than storage scopes and had enough
sensitivity to directly observe a lot of the signals generated by animal
muscle movements and brain activity. In order to correlate two different
signals in the body (for example, brain activity and subsequent muscle
movement) you needed to monitor two points simaltaneously without the lost
of signal or noise that might be generated by sharing one beam using the
"chopped" mode.
The other dual beam scopes like the 551, 555, and 556 found uses in the
nuclear energy industry. In these cases, the signals were much faster than
those found in the biomedical industry (like in a nuclear blast) and whole
events were missed if the "alternate" mode of a dual channel amplifier was
chosen. Even in the "chopped" mode whole events could be lost between
samples taken at the chopping rate. The answer was to use more scopes
simaltaneously, or in some cases, the use of dual beam scopes could save you
from having to have multiple scopes.
Stan
w7ni@...
