Rigol Trigger Out/Pass/Fail connector.

[Rene]

Hello,

I noticed that my Rigol oscilloscope has a BNC connector on the back that is labeled "Trigger Out/Pass/Fail". Just for fun, I wanted to take the signal coming out that connector and plug it into the oscilloscope channel 1 input.

The problem is that I am afraid of taking a BNC cable and directly connecting the two connectors because I don't know if this will hurt the oscilloscope in some way.

Is it safe to just connect the two connectors together via a straight BNC cable or do I need something a little bit more fancy to make that happen?

Thanks.

[alex.forencich]

If you hooking something up to a scope input channel, there is nothing to worry about.  They break it out as a BNC for convenience so you can do exactly that.  You can also generally run it to the trigger input on the back of a scope, though this can be slightly more fiddly than coming in through a channel input (generally you can only do edge triggering with a fixed threshold).  Generally those outputs are just 0 or 5v, so nothing really to worry about.  And it should be protected against shorts internally with a series resistor. 

[Rene]

Thanks Alex.

For a second I thought I would have to buy one of those crazy BNC cables with terminators on them so they pretend to be some sort of oscilloscope prove.

By the way, is there a particular BNC spec cable I should get? I keep reading a lot about 50 / 75 ohms and other interesting specifications.

Thanks.