Siglent SDS1104x-e Aquiring signal so long, does not have time to display it

[MarkKn]

Hi, all. I have been reading this forum for quite some time, and now that I have reached a point of frustration with my scope, I thought I would reach out for a lifeline here. My electronic knowledge is maybe a little more than basic. Certainly understand waves and voltages. I also have good computer knowledge.

I imagine I have unintentionally set some setting somewhere, but my almost new siglent scope is non functional for some reason. I have two channels going, displaying a 1khz sine wave. There is a little progress bar in the lower right of the screen that says acquiring. It takes a few seconds to acquire and as soon as it completes, it starts again, never getting around to displaying the trace anymore. I did some reading in the sampling/acquire part of the manual, but did not find an answer.

I used to use a basic electronic scope back in the day, tube and phosphor. This new scope does some really great things, but I have not quite mastered it. I will open the manual again and see if there is some sort of overall reset to default settings, as it used to work pretty well.

Any help appreciated.

[BlackICE]

Read up on triggering modes. Seems like you might have it on auto. If you want to get one trace and capture it then you single capture mode Auto mode captures traces over and over again never stopping. Also check your time base, seems like you are probably using a large sec/div that's why it seems dead for a while.

[bdunham7]

1.  Press the green 'Default' button
2.  Connect your signal(s) and turn on the channels that you are connected to.
3.  If you don't see a signal, Press 'Auto Setup'.

If you really have two 1kHz sine waves and that doesn't work, then something has gone awry.  In the utility menu I think there is a factory default option, so if you get this far try that.

[tautech]

At timebase settings slower than 50ms/div the scope enters auto Roll mode and these models also have a dedicated Roll mode where nothing is displayed until the display buffer is full.
In dedicated Roll mode the Roll button will be lit whereas in auto Roll mode the indication is the display being slowly filled from the right.

Both can be useful for slow frequency waveforms.
Unlike CRO where we can look at the timebase control to see its settings whereas with a DSO you need look at a tab with that info on the display.

Keep playing with it and learn all its capabilities. 

[rstofer]

Start with Reply 150 in this thread where Charlotte buys a SDS1202X-E and begins to explore a LOT of the options.  There's a lot to learn by following along in this thread.

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/beginners/what-an-oscilloscope-recommended-for-a-woman-passionate-about-electronics/150/

[MarkKn]

Thanks for the suggestions. Turns out the default button is on front of the scope. I hit that and things went back to a usable state. I will be learning more about the scope functioning so that next time I am not so helpless. When I saw acquire for some reason I was thinking about the sampling process, and it was helpful to get re-directed to the trigger process. There are some other behaviors on triggering that puzzle me, so good place to take a deep dive.