Test and Measurement Forum

Hi,

Can I use your scope to look at and measure CCTV camera signals and record them?

Its 1Vpp signal. I need to record the level of signal from camera and at the receiver/image recorder.

Which unit (if any) and how to achieve this would be useful. I am a consultant and just been given the job of testing some installations.

Regards

Chris

Hi Chris it depends on how long you want to capture the signal for? Also depends on what kind of detail you want to get out of it.

Kind regards

Hi,

I just want to check the quality and loss of the signal over a single cable.

So I first need to check the camera and then the recorder end.

Ideally capturing an image of the signal at both stages.

Being able to see any noise would be an advantage.

- I must declare that I am not an electronics engineer and like most CCTV people normally just check that an image is received. With more and more digital recording systems the actual signal is becoming more and more important and I am looking for a cheap effective way of getting that information.

I saw on this site some captured data already from CCTV signals and I think that would be ideal to assist in finding out why some images are better than others for my client.

Chris

Hi sorry for the delayed response, I have been in and out of the office.

Hi I would assume that your CCTV signal would be similar to that of an analogue TV signal. Any of our scopes will allow you to have a look at the signal, however it all depends on the level of detail you want. For example if you use our entry level oscilloscope , the 2203, then you can see one line of data, if however you wanted to have a look at a whole frame and zoom into it then you need something with a larger memory (the more memory you have on a scope the longer you can sample at high rates).

Another consideration is voltage resolution, the more bits you have the more detail you will get out of your voltage. The 2203 is 8 bits and gives you 256 increments across each voltage range we provide (so if you were to use the +/-1 V range then you would have 2V/256 approximately 8mV).

If however you want more detail, our 12 bit scopes will give more increments, 4096, so 2V/4096 is approximately 0.4mV). So if you are interested in looking at noise on the signal a 12 bit scope is more appropriate (3224 or 4224).

However a picture is worth a thousand words, so I have taken some screen shots of various scopes with a video signal generator, hopefully this will help you make your mind up, please look at the attached pdf file.