When you’re hunting for a signal with your oscilloscope, the stronger it is, the better. If it’s weak, you might struggle to tease it out from other interference, or even from the noise floor itself.

Newman-Kees Principal Consulting Engineer Frank Hertel says a friend recently brought him an old LPB 30-Watt AM transmitter for repair. It’s a good low-power transmitter, but this one had been abused.

RF signals historically are measured using spectrum analyzers, at least that was before oscilloscopes offered sufficient bandwidth for those measurements. With oscilloscope bandwidths over 100 GHz, RF ...