Oscilloscope in the context of Reticle

A cathode-ray tube (CRT) is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns, which emit electron beams that are manipulated to display images on a phosphorescent screen. The images may represent electrical waveforms on an oscilloscope, a frame of video on an analog television set (TV), digital raster graphics on a computer monitor, or other phenomena like radar targets. A CRT in a TV is commonly called a picture tube. CRTs have also been used as memory devices, in which case the screen is not intended to be visible to an observer. The term cathode ray was used to describe electron beams when they were first discovered, before it was understood that what was emitted from the cathode was a beam of electrons.

In CRT TVs and computer monitors, the entire front area of the tube is scanned repeatedly and systematically in a fixed pattern called a raster. In color devices, an image is produced by controlling the intensity of each of three electron beams, one for each additive primary color (red, green, and blue) with a video signal as a reference. In modern CRT monitors and TVs the beams are bent by magnetic deflection, using a deflection yoke. Electrostatic deflection is commonly used in oscilloscopes.

An electron gun (also called electron emitter) is an electrical component in some vacuum tubes that produces a narrow, collimated electron beam that has a precise kinetic energy.

The largest use is in cathode-ray tubes (CRTs), used in older television sets, computer displays and oscilloscopes, before the advent of flat-panel displays. Electron guns are also used in field-emission displays (FEDs), which are essentially flat-panel displays made out of rows of extremely small cathode-ray tubes. They are also used in microwave linear beam vacuum tubes such as klystrons, inductive output tubes, travelling-wave tubes, and gyrotrons, as well as in scientific instruments such as electron microscopes and particle accelerators.

A vector monitor, vector display, or calligraphic display is a display device used for computer graphics up through the 1970s. It is a type of CRT, similar to that of an early oscilloscope. In a vector display, the image is composed of drawn lines rather than a grid of glowing pixels as in raster graphics. The electron beam follows an arbitrary path, tracing the connected sloped lines rather than following the same horizontal raster path for all images. The beam skips over dark areas of the image without visiting their points.

Some refresh vector displays use a normal phosphor that fades rapidly and needs constant refreshing 30-40 times per second to show a stable image. These displays, such as the Imlac PDS-1, require some local refresh memory to hold the vector endpoint data. Other storage tube displays, such as the popular Tektronix 4010, use a special phosphor that continues glowing for many minutes. Storage displays do not require any local memory. In the 1970s, both types of vector displays were much more affordable than bitmap raster graphics displays when megapixel computer memory was still very expensive. Today, raster displays have replaced nearly all uses of vector displays.

Clipping is a form of waveform distortion that occurs when an amplifier is overdriven and attempts to deliver an output voltage or current beyond its maximum capability. Driving an amplifier into clipping may cause it to output power in excess of its power rating.

In the frequency domain, clipping produces strong harmonics in the high-frequency range (as the clipped waveform comes closer to a square wave). The extra high-frequency weighting of the signal could make tweeter damage more likely than if the signal was not clipped.

In mathematics and signal processing, the time domain is a representation of how a signal, function, or data set varies with time. It is used for the analysis of mathematical functions, physical signals or time series of economic or environmental data.

In the time domain, the independent variable is time, and the dependent variable is the value of the signal. This contrasts with the frequency domain, where the signal is represented by its constituent frequencies. For continuous-time signals, the value of the signal is defined for all real numbers representing time. For discrete-time signals, the value is known at discrete, often equally-spaced, time intervals. It is commonly visualized using a graph where the x-axis represents time and the y-axis represents the signal's value. An oscilloscope is a common tool used to visualize real-world signals in the time domain.

Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent company, it is now a subsidiary of Ralliant, a spinoff from Fortive.

Electronic test equipment is used to create signals and capture responses from electronic devices under test (DUTs). In this way, the proper operation of the DUT can be proven or faults in the device can be traced. Use of electronic test equipment is essential to any serious work on electronics systems.

Practical electronics engineering and assembly requires the use of many different kinds of electronic test equipment ranging from the very simple and inexpensive (such as a test light consisting of just a light bulb and a test lead) to extremely complex and sophisticated such as automatic test equipment (ATE). ATE often includes many of these instruments in real and simulated forms.

Calligraphic projection (also known as vector graphics) is a system for displaying or projecting an image composed of a beam of light or electrons directly tracing the image, as opposed to sweeping in raster order over the entire display surface, as in a standard pixel-based display. Calligraphic projection is presently often used for laser lighting displays, whereby one or more laser beams draws an image on a screen by reflecting the laser beam from one or more mirrors attached to a deflecting mechanism.

Analog oscilloscopes have customarily employed this kind of vector graphics, as did a number of CRT-based vector monitor computer graphics terminals in the 1970s and 1980s, such as the Tektronix 4014 and the Evans & Sutherland Picture System.

Music visualization or music visualisation is animated computer-generated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time, synchronizing with the music as it is played. The feature is found in electronic music visualizers and media player software.

Visualization techniques range from simple ones (e.g., a simulation of an oscilloscope display) to elaborate ones, which often include a number of composited effects. The changes in the music's loudness and frequency spectrum are among the properties used as input to the visualization.

In electronics, a voltage divider (also known as a potential divider) is a passive linear circuit that produces an output voltage (V_out) that is a fraction of its input voltage (V_in). Voltage division is the result of distributing the input voltage among the components of the divider. A simple example of a voltage divider is two resistors connected in series, with the input voltage applied across the resistor pair and the output voltage emerging from the connection between them.

Resistor voltage dividers are commonly used to create reference voltages, or to reduce the magnitude of a voltage so it can be measured, and may also be used as signal attenuators at low alternating current frequencies. For direct current and relatively low alternating current frequencies, a voltage divider may be sufficiently accurate if made only of resistors; where frequency response over a wide range is required (such as in an oscilloscope probe), a voltage divider may have capacitive elements added to compensate load capacitance. In electric power transmission, a capacitive voltage divider is used for measurement of high voltage.

In electronics, high impedance means that a point in a circuit (a node) allows a relatively small amount of current through, per unit of applied voltage at that point. High impedance circuits are low current and potentially high voltage, whereas low impedance circuits are the opposite (low voltage and potentially high current). Numerical definitions of "high impedance" vary by application.

High-impedance inputs are preferred on measuring instruments such as voltmeters or oscilloscopes. In audio systems, a high-impedance input may be required for use with devices such as crystal microphones or other devices with high internal impedance.

John Erik Bertrand Johnson (born Johan Erik Bertrand; October 2, 1887 – November 27, 1970) was a Swedish-born American electrical engineer and physicist. He created the first cathode-ray tube oscilloscope and detailed a fundamental source of random interference with information traveling on wires, now called Johnson–Nyquist noise.

In optics, various autocorrelation functions can be experimentally realized. The field autocorrelation may be used to calculate the spectrum of a source of light, while the intensity autocorrelation and the interferometric autocorrelation are commonly used to estimate the duration of ultrashort pulses produced by modelocked lasers. The laser pulse duration cannot be easily measured by optoelectronic methods, since the response time of photodiodes and oscilloscopes are at best of the order of 200 femtoseconds, yet laser pulses can be made as short as a few femtoseconds.

In the following examples, the autocorrelation signal is generated by the nonlinear process of second-harmonic generation (SHG). Other techniques based on two-photon absorption may also be used in autocorrelation measurements, as well as higher-order nonlinear optical processes such as third-harmonic generation, in which case the mathematical expressions of the signal will be slightly modified, but the basic interpretation of an autocorrelation trace remains the same. A detailed discussion on interferometric autocorrelation is given in several well-known textbooks.