How can I measure the noise on my AC mains with a 2ch oscilloscope?


I’m not an EE so although I have some nice test equipment I need help. Here is the problem, the AC Mains are 120 vac but I’m trying to measure the noise on the AC signal , millivolts. I’d like to answer two questions how bad is my power and second  does my isolation transformer make a difference.

 

thanks for the help 

badbruno

Hey OP!

I’ve done this before and I have some thoughts. DIYaudio is a better place for this type of hackery. You should have a 10:1 or 100:1 probe for your scope.

The thing I learned though is that an oscilloscope by itself is not actually very useful except in seeing really gross issues. For instance, I had an LED lamp which caused audible buzzing and you could see the "bite" the power supply took out of every positive going AC cycle. The bad news is that unless things are gross you don’t really get any sense of how good or bad the AC waveform is. For this you need to know things like harmonic distortion and/or a spectrum analyzer. First will give you a basic readout of how close to ideal the wave shape is, second will tell you more or less where in the frequency spectrum your problems are.

You might want to consider a PC based software solution, which uses the audio inputs, and maybe a custom, isolated interface to prevent the risk of injecting raw AC into your PC’s audio input. There are some good online resources for how to make one of these.  The limiting factor here is maximum frequency response will be limited to about 20 kHz. You won't see any RFI noise this way.

Your components' power supplies are designed to putput clean DC to activate the circuitry. No need to worry neurotically about noise on the AC line. Competent engineering takes care of that.

Thanks you sharing your insights and perspective. I never thought of this as being a Hack… hmm 

yes the AC into the OScope is an issue even with my 10x or 100x probs.

Can you share some leads to these “on line resources” ?

Hey OP? 

thanks 

 

Post removed