Displaying Data 6
6000 Series Oscilloscope User’s Guide 265
Acquisition Modes
The 6000 Series oscilloscopes have the following acquisition
modes:
•Normal — for most waveforms (with normal decimating at
slower sweep speeds, no averaging).
•Peak Detect — for displaying narrow pulses that occur
infrequently (at slower sweep speeds).
•Averaging — for reducing noise and increasing resolution (at
all sweep speeds, without bandwidth or rise time
degradation).
•High Resolution — for reducing random noise (at slower sweep
speeds).
Realtime sampling (where the oscilloscope produces the
waveform display from samples collected during one trigger
event) can be turned off or on in the Normal, Peak Detect, and
High Resolution modes.

At Slower Sweep Speeds

At slower sweep speeds, the sample rate drops because the
acquisition time increases and the oscilloscope’s digitizer is
sampling faster than is required to fill memory.
For example, suppose an oscilloscope’s digitizer has a sample
period of 1 ns (maximum sample rate of 1 GSa/s) and a 1 M
memory depth. At that rate, memory is filled in 1 ms. If the
acquisition time is 100 ms (10 ms/div), only 1 of every 100
samples is needed to fill memory.

Selecting the Acquisition mode

To select the acquisition mode on 6000A Series oscilloscopes
press the Acquire key on the front panel.
To manually control the acquisition mode on 6000L models
start the Remote Front Panel (see page 44) and select Wavefor m
from the Main Menu or press ctrl+A to access the oscilloscope’s
Acquire Menu.