Telequipment D53 oscilloscope

[Yorkie]

You don't say if you have the manual Rob. If not, you can download it FOC from Jon's excellent website at this link:

http://www.thevalvepage.com/download/dow...e=d53a.pdf&dir=telequipment

I'm not familiar with the scope, but many scopes have a built in test waveform such as 1KHz at 1 Volt or whatever. Useful for checking the scope. If you don't have a built in test waveform, if you open up your ESR meter and clip the scope probe onto pin 2 of the 74HC14N IC, (and ground) you should see a nice square wave of about 150KHz of perhaps 3 or 4 Volts. Set the volts per div on the scope to 2 Volts and the waveform should be about 2 cms high peak to peak. With the timebase set to 50 us/div, you should see about 7 or 8 square wave cycles across the screen. It can be confusing to work out what uS/Div on the X axis is in terms of frequency, so the figures below might help in understanding what setting to use for an given frequency:

100ms/div = 10Hz
50ms/div = 20Hz
20ms/div = 50Hz
10ms/div = 100Hz
5ms/div = 200Hz
2ms/div = 500Hz
1 ms/div = 1KHz
0.5ms/div = 2KHz
0.2ms/div = 5KHz
0.1ms/div = 10KHz
50us/div = 20KHz
20us/div = 50KHz
10us/div = 100KHz
5 us/div = 200KHz
2us/div = 500KHz
1us/div = 1MHz
0.5us/div = 2MHz
0.2us/div = 5 MHz

So for example, if you were checking the secondary of a mains transformer - 50Hz AC, with the timebase set to100ms/div (10Hz) you should see a sine wave with 5 cycles on the screen.
At 20ms/div you'd see just one cycle.

As has been said, the first thing you need to do is to get a flat line across the screen which you can move up and down the screen with the Y position control.

Hope that helps a bit.

Best of luck with it Rob!