Conventional scopes have a hold off knob to adjust the moment the scope is allowed to search for the next trigger. Does the 5204 have an equivalent modus? I need it to trigger on complex waveforms (first of a series of pulses)
If by 'hold-off' you are alluding to trigger after a time delay, then that is possible. If however, you wish to trigger after 'n' trigger events, then that is not a feature.
Sorry to reactivate an old post, but I am trying to accomplish trigger holdoff with my 3405A and the advanced triggering documentation doesn't make it clear how to set it up.
My goal is to trigger on a rising edge of a rapid signal, but no more often than once per second. That is, after a trigger is observed, wait one second before re-arming to detect another edge.
I can manually create this effect by setting Trigger to Single and clicking the green arrow button once a second, but I would like this to happen automatically.
It looks as though a hold-off feature is not supported by the device.
What you could try doing is to input a repeating signal at 1Hz on the External Trigger input (try the signal generator) and use the Logic Trigger functionality to trigger the oscilloscope when the condition is met on Channel A AND the External Trigger input.
The oscilloscope will only trigger when both conditions on Channel A and the External Trigger Input are met.
Unfortunately that is not a useful solution for my needs. I need a delay before re-arming the trigger to catch the next event, whenever it might occur. Using a logic trigger with a square wave input would miss randomly-timed triggers half the time (while the square wave is low).
It seems like this could be implemented in software with, perhaps, some reasonable loss of precision. In "trigger holdoff mode," for example, PicoScope would be set to "Repeating" but secretly tell the instrument "Single"...after capturing a triggered event, wait the specified delay, then secretly tell the instrument "Run" again (still in Single mode). This would not be very precise, as it would be dependent on the host PC and USB bus for timing, but it would be usable for some situations.
I will pass on the suggestion to the Development Team.
You may also wish to consider setting up a trigger at the end of the data stream using something like a Level Dropout Trigger so you are capturing the data of interest as pre-trigger samples.
It might be useful to see examples of waveforms that you are capturing.