Saving Waveforms and Setups
3–126 TDS 684A, TDS 744A, & TDS 784A User Manual
Clear the Spool. To remove all hardcopies from the spool, press SHIFT ➞
HARDCOPY MENU ➞ Clear Spool (main) ➞ OK Confirm Clear Spool
(side).
The oscilloscope takes advantage of any unused RAM when spooling hardcopies
to printers. The size of the spool is, therefore, variable. The number of hardco-
pies that can be spooled depends on three variables:
The amount of unused RAM
The hardcopy format chosen
The complexity of the display
Although not guaranteed, usually about 2.5 hardcopies can be spooled before the
oscilloscope must wait to send the rest of the third copy.
To send hardcopies to a floppy disk, do the following steps.
1. Set up the oscilloscope communication and hardware parameters as outlined
in To Set Up for Making Hardcopies on page 3–122.
2. Insert a formatted 720 Kbyte or 1.44 Mbyte floppy disk into the slot at the
left of the oscilloscope display.
NOTE. To format disks, delete hardcopy files you save to disk, and otherwise
manage the disk storage, see Managing the File System on page 3–117.
3. Press SHIFT ➞ HARDCOPY MENU ➞ Port (main) ➞ File (side) to
specify that any hardcopy made be output to a file on the floppy drive. The
file list and its scrollbar will appear.
4. Turn the general purpose knob to place the scroll bar over the file in which to
store the hardcopy.
NOTE. Upon power on, the oscilloscope creates the “wild card” file
TEK?????.FMT for storing hardcopies, where “.FMT” is replaced by the
hardcopy format you select. Selecting this file and pressing Hardcopy stores a
hardcopy in a uniquely named, sequentially numbered file. For instance, the
oscilloscope saves the first hardcopy you save to the file TEK00001.FMT, the
second to TEK00002.FMT, and so on.
5. Press HARDCOPY to print your hardcopy to the selected file.
Saving files to the floppy disk provides a convenient way to store hardcopies.
You can print hardcopies stored on disk at a site remote from where the
hardcopies were captured using another TDS oscilloscope. Or you might load
To Save to a Floppy Disk