I was building a simple sinewave generator and ran into problems wich I traced to a 66.67 hertz wave. This wave doesn't show even with a wire attached to the oscilliscope lead. However touching the lead with the hands reveal it as a 1.6 volt almost sinusidal wave. 2 spikes off the wave. This has the ability of triggering transistors and diodes, latching and unlatching scrs, and interfering with phase relations of unshielded circuits. I took pictures of my oscilloscopes display. This signal has be caught up to 83 hertz and gets adjusted back to 66 hertz periodically.
So I'm asking if your scopes show this signal, and what area are you in? Touch your lead and tell me, nothing runs off of 66 hertz and why do I seem to be the perfect antenna for this wave? The pic will come later I use my camera for my business and can't unload it yet.

Addition: ok. got it off the camera, 3 pics zipped comes to 4.8 megs, I think it's to large to post here and can't find the info on attachment size anymore, so if someone would please refresh my memory on attachment size. might have to go with 1 pic. Of course I may not be getting max transfer as the impedence could be off, this really messes with a construction project.

I compressed your pics down to 800x600 res to save bandwidth !
More than 4 Mbytes for the pics are just too much !
Please scale them down to 800x600 res before posting them next time.

Well, anyway, do you think your scope is calibrated rightly ?
Maybe it is just the pickup of the 60 Hz USA grid ?

maybe your body is actually the transmitter of the wavelength... stranger things have been known to happen...

Just got it tested Erie Institute of Technology the scope is on and the calibration circuit is dead on. This signal is a pain ( usually it's a perfect 15 milisecond wave), it's hard to build and modify circuits while they are shielded. I wonder if this is coming from something running in Canada?

Quote from: raburgeson on June 07, 2006, 05:02:17 AM
This signal is a pain ( usually it's a perfect 15 milisecond wave), it's hard to build and modify circuits while they are shielded. I wonder if this is coming from something running in Canada?

Maybe you are picking up transmissions from a microwave tower- eg: a wireless internet service provider or  cell phone tower.  They have been popping up all over the place in rural areas where broadband isn't available via cable.