[Radio Wrangler]

There are several ways you can go.

The most used in the day was to use a camera. Various firms made cameras specifically to fit onto popular makes of scope. HP's 197A had a UV illuminator to make the screen glow a little to show up the graticule, and took Polaroid film packs. There was no exposure metering so you set things on guess-and-hope until you'd built up some experience. Polaroid film was expensive. It is now very expensive and difficult to find.

Some makers made analogue scopes with sampling systems to produce a low speed plot that could go either to an external X/Y plotter, or to a built-in paper-roll printer. One of these nowadays would be a serious restoration project.

Then we come to digitising scopes. Some will drive an external printer, a few include printers.

Finally there are test executive softwares which can drive digital scopes and extract data, format as you wish and drive printers, make image files, whatever you want. But these things are capable of much more, and priced for it.

Trying to put your own digitiser or sampler onto an existing scope would be a massive design undertaking, and whatever you did would load the Y amplifier chain, affecting its performance. The amount of effort and time involved, if applied to most jobs would earn you enough money to buy a modern digitising scope and a printer and software! I don't imagine anyone going this route other than through seeing it as a challenge.

If you just want to record things on the screen, the camera route is the quickest and cheapest. You just need some bench space and a mini tripod for a fairly pedestrian digital camera. Cast-off digital cameras are almost worthless once they are no longer at the current number of megapixels, and yet will have plenty of resolution for this job.


Oh, and you can also zoom out or pull back to get a photo of the scope control settings!

David