My friend Tom was kind enough to loan me his oscilloscope, a basic 20Mhz model, but adequate to what I needed it for: testing to see what was going on with my Softrock Lite II. Just for fun, I first tried hooking it up to the simple crystal oscillator/buffer amplifier that I built a few weeks back. I never really used an oscilloscope before (thanks again Tom for entrusting it to me), but a few minutes of swapping things around gave the following:

A pretty nice looking sine wave! I’m not entirely impressed, since I am aware that the harmonics of this signal are probably beyond the range of the scope to measure, but it still looks pretty nice.

The next thing was to try to see if my Softrock was still working. The main oscillator runs at 28+ Mhz, but the divided flip flop is divided by a factor of four, so it should basically look the same. I’d expect it to look a little more like a square waves, but I’d be shocked if it was very close, since again, all the higher harmonics are likely to get attenuated. Here’s the pic:

Pretty much as expected!

I’m too tired to do a good job on this yet, but I was afraid that the dividers weren’t working, and they both clearly are. When I get some time this weekend, I’ll work on trying to understand what’s going on with the rest of the radio.

Thanks again, Tom!