Hi, There's a control on your oscilloscope that you're almost certainly familiar with, but you may not know to advantages to actually using it. And it's what's called a fine Vernier control on your vertical channel and you'll see that it says push for fine here and most modern oscilloscopes will have our push Abul controls not only push a ball on the position, adjust so that you push it and the waveform goes to the center of the screen like this. Or you can push your volts per division control like this and you'll see Channel 1 scale is now fine and you can adjust it in much finer steps. But why is that useful? So you're familiar with your volts per division control, you can see it up here.

One volt per division. It's usually in a one to five sequence that can vary depending on the manufacturer. So you'll get like one volt per division, 2 volts, 5 volts. you get 1 millivolt, 2 millivolts, 5 millivolts, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500 and so on.

So you ingest it in large steps. But as you can see, sometimes the waveform can get too large and if you if we just Center that there like this. Okay, it's taking up a good lot of the screen here like this, but let's just get rid of that. But if we go up there ah sorry, it's off the screen so if we push that we can get a fine vertical adjust like this so that we can make it any size we want.

Well what's the point of that you might ask? Well there's actually two advantages to this. The first advantage is isn't comparing waveforms. Let me Center both of these waveforms here I'll push the center and you can see that they're not the same voltage, but they're both 1 kilohertz sine waves and they look pretty identical. And if you make it bigger like that, we can make this one a bit bigger.

They look pretty identical, don't they? But let's go in there and have a look. Are they identical? But let's push our find Vernier Control and actually adjust Channel 1 until it matches channel 2 like this. And if we go in like that, we can see that there's little subtle differences in there between the two two channels. They're not quite the same are they? And that's the first advantage of you.

Fine Vernier control. so you won't be able to see it if it's like that or like that. for example, you can't see it. but when you make him even, that makes a big difference.

so that's very useful. but you might be familiar with that. Let's go to the second reason and the second reason you might want to use your Vernier control is the subject of this video. How To Make Your Measurements On Your Oscilloscope This is one of the advantages of digital oscilloscopes is that you can actually take measurements of the waveform.

There have been some analog oscilloscopes in the past that could do measurements and stuff like that, but they usually cursor based. When you've got stuff in the digital domain, you can measure things accurately. anyway. let's take a look.

We've just got a 1 kilohertz sine wave here. 4 volts peak-to-peak and because we've only got 8 divisions total vertical here, you can see that it is basically using up all of the screen. But if we go into measure here and we actually try and measure the peak to peak voltage, we can get rid of those statistics. There we go, you'll notice that it's not actually calculating anything here.

It's not able to because the waveform is just a couple of samples couple of pixels from the outside of the window. so it can't measure that. it can't. Trust me.

That is actually a real-time update in that. so it can kind of give you the value down here. but you're not going to be able to get any of your statistics. You're not gonna be able to get your mean value and see your standard deviation.

Sieglin is ridiculous by the way. Look at this zero point zero. Pico volts. Give me a break.

You usually won't see that kind of stuff on a bigger brand instrument. The software should know that that is a ridiculous value and it shouldn't even display it. Unbelievable. Anyway, so what we have to do of course is change our range down like this to one volt per division and now it can actually start measuring.

I'll restart that just in case. Always restart your statistics after you change ranges, time bases. anything like that because there might be some accumulated error there or something like that. Just to be sure and we should eventually get a standard deviation value.

You can see the mean value for point 1 2 volts. It's got two decimal places of resolution there and I don't know why it doesn't give us a deviation value straight away. Other scopes I've got here. they all give it to you straight away, but Siglent takes time up there.

Have a point. Oh one pica volts. I Unbelievable. Don't actually this point.

Oh - oh yeah, this was working before. Trust me. Have I found a bug? I Don't think I'm using the latest firmware. I In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm not.

Let me just upgrade the firmware here. I'll get back to you now. Unfortunately, the news firmware doesn't make this work. We still have the same problem I swear it was working before I Did a quick test before this video just to make sure it was gonna do the business and know what the okay.

I changed the two volts per division and it's working now. So if we turn the statistics off and I'm effectively resetting them, give it a couple of counts and or doesn't or two and it should. There we go. We now have a mean value for point two, four volts.

We're measuring the peak to peak voltage and a standard deviation. So this is like the like. the spread of the values that is actually getting because there's noise in' and a sampling error and other stuff on the signal. Okay, so effectively 25 millivolts is the spread of the measurements that it's getting, not still not working.

Damn annoying. Anyway, I can still show you what I'm talking about. So remember that figure: 25 millivolts, standard deviation, and two decimal places here. Okay, so let's go up.

So as I show before, if we change the time base to 500 millivolts per division, it's just outside. It can't measure it. Okay, so this is where our Vernier can come in. We can push, hence it says variable There we can go in and just get it under until it starts displaying our value and bingo, What do you know? Look at the standard deviation there.

It is smaller than what we had before. Let's reset that. Look at that nine odd millivolts effectively. we have a more accurate measurement, even though on this particular signal scope, it hasn't given us any extra resolution here.

But on other scopes it will. And the reason it's going to give you a smaller standard deviation here. More error you can think of the standard deviation as the uncertainty in your signal. Basically, the reason that it's smaller which is better it's ie.

it's more accurate in quote marks is that it has more bits from your ADC to work with than it did. When the signals down here like this, you remember we've only got an 8-bit analog to digital converter. so if your signals right down here like this, let's let's go down to five volts per division, shall we? And it doesn't work down there either. Ridiculous.

Given up on this siglent scope. All right, let's check out the road and Schwarz scope. This one actually uses a 10-bit ADC as you've heard about before, which is better than the eight bit ADC used in most other scopes. I've changed it because we have 10 divisions here I've changed it to our five point two Volts P2p.

so you'll see the tips of the waveform there top and bottom, just outside the range. so you'll notice it can't measure the peak to peak voltage. It says it's clipping I Love that it actually says clipping. they're plus/minus That's that's very nice.

If we actually change our vertical scale here, this is the best scale that we can get that actually has it all on-screen that's going to give us a reading. We'll reset the stats there and look at this. I Mean we're getting four decimal places on the standard deviation, Four decimal places on the the current. that's not current current as in amps, that's current value and the mean value.

So Nine Point Six standard deviation. Okay, let's go down a range reset. Bingo. 15 millivolt standard deviation.

It's got more error even though it's got that gorgeous big 10 bit analog to digital converter, it's still going to give you a a greater error, greater variance in your values, and will go down again. Look at that. 60 millivolts. Reset that down.

There we go. so you can see how that changing the range actually upset that value. That's upset the Applecart there. So you got to reset your stats.

Is that? could that be a bug? Yeah, 36 millivolts. But if we hit our Vernier, go all the way with LBJ Let's go. And so it's just lower than that. Bingo reset.

Our error Standard deviation is now Five Point Seven. We're getting a more accurate reading. Brilliant. And watch this.

You see how we've got four decimal places at the moment. but if we change it to a smaller one. Bingo! We drop back to two decimal places on our current value. It's still showing the mean as four decimal places because you can get a mathematically higher thing.

But the scope. Smart enough to know I'm not gonna give you these BS extra digits in there. There's four digits when I know very well that I can't do that. That's the scope saying that, so it only gives you the two decimal places.

Very nice. So there you go. That's a neat way using your Vernier to maximize the accuracy of your scope. Now, of course, it must be said that oscilloscopes are inherently not that absolute accurate.

Go and check out the specs for the scopes I Don't know what their own Schwartz is offhand, but they're in the order of like one percent. Absolutely, they're a half a percent. You know they're like even a couple of percent absolute error. So they're not their best things in the business for measuring absolute values.

But hey, if you're measuring difference between signals and things like that, all that extra resolution matters. And let's use our Keysight 3000t series I Couldn't use the low end ones. They're a 1200 X series because it doesn't have the Us Statistics measurements and you can see that. Our standard deviation: 1 point 3 milli volts If we go down like that, let's reset our starts again.

three point seven Your this, You can see our error increasing eight. But if we turn on our Vernier and go right near the top there and reset 1.2 million votes. Standard deviation: beautiful and just like the road. and Schwartz We've got four decimal places there and it's smart enough to know that if we actually go down bingo, we drop a decimal place because, well, anything else is just BS and the new Rai goes 7000-series Let's reset our statistics there and we're looking at 50 millivolts standard deviation 13 something like that.

and if we go down, its reset it. but we'll reset it anyway. Bingo. Look at, that's more than doubled 35 millivolts and go right down 84 millivolts.

Horrible. But if we turn our vernier on, give them a bit of a clicky and up. you can see this is a good example. It hasn't updated.

You can see how many bits it's got to play with here. not many. This Rygar scope is just slow. It's not updating as I turned that thing, but that actually gives you a that's you know.

It's really quite neat because you're a representation of how many bits it's playing with. There not many is the answer. So that's why the standard deviation. The error is larger and right down here.

11 millivolts No. 8 7 6. Drop in a little bit 5. So there you go.

You can get extra resolution on your waveform on practically any oscilloscope that does these sorts of measurements. And by the way, you don't necessarily have to have these standard like these statistic measurements here. Just know that the just be confident that when you escape, you use that vernier control to adjust it to a like near enough to full scale. Like that, without clipping, you'll regulate just your regular.

Without the statistics. Let's turn the statistics off. Even without that, you know you can be fairly confident that you figure down here for your air, peak to peak measurement or whatever measurement you're doing is going to be more precise so to speak. And just be aware the similar thing can happen on horizontal measurements as well.

In this case, we're measuring the frequency. We're doing this via the samples. We're not using the hardware frequency counter, actually only running with our 10k sample points at the moment, so not many sample points. This is just to show you that it does actually work.

You can see that at one Kilohertz, where were like one decimal place there on the frequency and where one decimal place on the standard deviation. So that's 54. So let's actually change our increase our time base so that we get more stuff. Bingo! We're got two decimal places there on our standard deviation, but in the case of the horizontal, the standard deviation actually works in the opposite way.

If we go one wave format like I just basically wanted a bit cycles or two cycles on the screen or whatever, you can see that our standard deviation is quite high, but if we get more waveforms on the screen, our standard deviation goes down. so it actually works opposite to how it does on the vertical. But then you can get extra digits over here by zooming in like that. so it depends on how you want it.

But with today's deep memory scopes and things like that, the main advantage isn't on any horizontal stuff with the horizontal vernier, but you can really get some advantages in measurement accuracy with your vertical vernier. So there you go: I Hope you learned something there and you found that interesting. If you did, please give it a big thumbs up. And as always, discuss down below catch you next time.