PicoScope 2105 - Noisy traces?

KennyM · Post by **KennyM** » Mon Sep 15, 2008 6:05 pm

I just received a PicoScope 2105 (about 1 week ago) and firstly, I am very pleased with it.

It's is an excellent scope for the price, but it has one annoying feature.

Maybe it's a feature, maybe it is a fault? I hope someone can help me.

If I connect the probe tip, to the ground wire I'd expect to get an almost perfectly flat trace, with almost no ripple at all.

Instead I get constant noise of about 2 to 7 mV, and the sprectrum i sjust wild!

The same noise is evident on all signals that I trace, so I can't tell if I'm seeing real noise or the 'inherent' noise from the scope.

I could probably take some screen dumps if it would help.

Can anyone tell me if this is normal or a fault? Is there anything I can do to mitigate it?

picojohn · Post by **picojohn** » Thu Sep 18, 2008 2:39 pm

Hi Kenny,

Please attach a .psdata file showing this behaviour and send it to support@picotech.com with a link to this forum post.

Regards
John

KennyM · Post by **KennyM** » Thu Sep 18, 2008 3:43 pm

Done.[/quote]

picojohn · Post by **picojohn** » Fri Sep 19, 2008 10:47 am

Thank you Kenny,

My colleage has responded and will deal with this.

Regards
John

wayoda · Post by **wayoda** » Thu Oct 16, 2008 1:09 pm

Hi,
I have the same problem with a PS2104.
To me it looks like the noise is introduced by the LSB of the sampled data which seems to be switching between high and low at random.
This would explain why the noise is in the sampledata, no matter what inputrange is selected.
Is this a problem limited to the PS210X models?

Eberhard