What do *you* use your oscilloscope for?

[SeanB]

so next time a german asks you why you need al that gear : tell him it is to measure accurately the amount of beer in the stein and how many more he can have next oktoberfest.

Old world rivalries and grudges never die...

Only thing about Germans is where they put all that beer. I have seen them drink 5l of beer and more, and not need to go water the flowers, yet the rest will be out at least 2 times for a single litre of beer.

BTW, I don't drink beer, as I both dislike the taste ( but love the crunch of brewers yeast) and spent way too much time in breweries seeing how it's made.

[CatalinaWOW]

Save the gear bragging for more esoteric stuff like a TFA or a really broad band high resolution spectrum analyzer.

TFA?

Trifluoroacetic acid?

Trace file analyzer for Oracle databases?

Transfer function analyzer.  Not as big a deal nowdays, as for the most part it can be done with software on a DSO.  That acronym should be just fine today.

[Noise Floor]

so next time a german asks you why you need al that gear : tell him it is to measure accurately the amount of beer in the stein and how many more he can have next oktoberfest.

Brilliant. 

[PA4TIM]

There are rare days I do not use my scopes. I use them for my job, repairing test and calibration gear. In winter I use my Tek 547 more as in summer 
They are my most used electronic eyes.

[John Coloccia]

When I was a respectable engineer, I used it for...well...everything.  It's hard to even list it all because it's soooo damn much.

Now that I have my own business, and am doing analog audio stuff, I don't use it for much other than tracking down the occasional gremlin.  For example, sometimes I can hear a little "hair" working it's way into the circuit.  I want to be able to figure out where it's coming from.  Stuff like this is generally simple enough that I can almost go from just thinking about a design, to producing a board, and 9/10 times the prototype board comes in and it does pretty close to what I need it to do the first time.

Even if you're a hobbyiest, though, anything that has to do with timing is prime stomping grounds for a scope.  Communication, driving steppers, debouncing contacts, Class B or AB amps (crossover distortion, for example), tracking down inadequate decoupling (rails sagging or excess ripple), etc etc etc.  Anything that happens faster than a couple of seconds and can't be viewed on a DMM, the scope comes out.

But if I just need to get something like a PIC going, and maybe it needs to take some serial input and drive something, I can generally do that with nothing but paying attention to the datasheet, and maybe a DMM to make sure things I want to switch are actually switching, and things I want to read for testing purposes are actually at the correct voltages.  Once I know I can communicate with the outside world, things happen so slowly and have so much margin that a scope is not all that critical.

[Someone]

Normal days the scopes are used for design of hardware, today I needed to measure the condition of the batteries in the cars.

DSO-X sig gen capacitively coupled through a series resistor to the battery + terminal
Preamp probed directly on the battery + terminal
Additional channel of the scope measuring the voltage across the series resistor

It was nice to measure that with a "single" general purpose instrument, rather than needing a single purpose meter for each job.

[HighVoltage]

DSO-X sig gen capacitively coupled through a series resistor to the battery + terminal
Preamp probed directly on the battery + terminal
Additional channel of the scope measuring the voltage across the series resistor

It was nice to measure that with a "single" general purpose instrument, rather than needing a single purpose meter for each job.

That is indeed an interesting way to test a battery
Did you get any valuable data out of this test?
In comparison to other - good - battaries, you might be able to tell about the internal resistance of the cells, but you still do not know which cell is bad.

[Alex Eisenhut]

The average German thinks you're nuts if you own more than two pieces of test equipment (including 4.99 € DMMs). By the number of three they keep asking "what the hell do you need all that stuff for?!".

On the other hand , ask the average german how many steins he drank at the last oktoberfest and you run out of fingers and toes ...  bunch of beer swilling lederhosen clad sauer krauts if you ask me !

Hey! Some of us also quite enjoy scotch!

[Someone]

DSO-X sig gen capacitively coupled through a series resistor to the battery + terminal
Preamp probed directly on the battery + terminal
Additional channel of the scope measuring the voltage across the series resistor

It was nice to measure that with a "single" general purpose instrument, rather than needing a single purpose meter for each job.

That is indeed an interesting way to test a battery
Did you get any valuable data out of this test?
In comparison to other - good - battaries, you might be able to tell about the internal resistance of the cells, but you still do not know which cell is bad.

It worked better than expected, getting down to a 1mOhm noise floor (much much lower than the batteries were measuring at). I now know for sure that the batteries in all the cars need replacing.