Panning and Zooming Single or Stopped Acquisitions
When the oscilloscope is stopped, use the horizontal scale and position knobs to pan and zoom your waveform. The stopped display may contain several acquisitions worth of information, but only the last acquisition is available for pan and zoom.
The ability to pan (move horizontally) and scale (expand or compress horizontally) an acquired waveform is important because of the additional insight it can reveal about the captured waveform. This additional insight is often gained from seeing the waveform at different levels of abstraction. You may want to view both the big picture and the specific little picture details. The ability to examine waveform detail after the waveform has been acquired is a benefit generally associated with digital oscilloscopes. Often this is simply the ability to freeze the display for the purpose of measuring with cursors or printing the screen. Some digital oscilloscopes go one step further by including the ability to further examine the signal details after acquiring them by panning through the waveform and changing the horizontal scale. There is no limit imposed on the scaling ratio between the time/div used to acquire the data and the time/div used to view the data. There is, however, a useful limit. This useful limit is somewhat a function of the signal you are analyzing.
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