Dual Beam Oscilloscope

Dual beam oscilloscope with common time base

Dual Beam Oscilloscope with independent time base

The double beam analog oscilloscope can display two signals simultaneously.
 A special dual beam CRT generates and deflects two beams separately.

Unlike an ordinary Dual trace oscilloscope which time shared a single electron
beam, thus loosing about 50% of each signal, a dual beam oscilloscope
simultaneously produced two separate electron beams capturing the entirely
of both signals.
Also Dual trace oscilloscope cannot capture two fast transient events, as it
cannot switch quickly enough between traces.so to avoid these problems
Dual Beam Oscilloscope is used.

Construction
- The dual beam oscilloscope has two separate electron beams and therefore
two completely separate vertical channels.each channel consists of a
preamplifier and attenuator.
- There is single set of horizontal plates and single time base circuit.
- The sweep generator drives the horizontal amplifier which in turn drives the
plates.
- The horizontal plates sweep both the beams across the screen at the same
rate.

There are two methods of used for generating the two electron beams within the
CRT.
1) Double gun tube
2) Split beam

A. Double gun tube: method allows the brightness and focus of each beam to
be controlled separately but it is bulkier than a split beam.
B. Split beam : In this method a single electron gun is used.
A horizontal splitter plate is placed between the last anode and the Y
deflection plate.
This plate is held at the same potential as the anode, and it goes along
the length of tube,between the two vertical deflection plates which
isolates the channels.

Disadvantages:
This arrangement has half the brightness of single beam.
 The two display may have noticeably different brightness .