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I posted about this some months ago: https://poal.co/s/oldtechnology/774380

I finally decided to try and bring it up, as I'm cleaning things out in preparation for donating unneeded things to a local place that auctions stuff off for operating funds.

I decided not to use my death cheater but instead soldered a power cord to the input connections. I just rawdogged it right to the isolation transformer. To my surprise, it came up - but no sweep, no movement of any sort, just a dot. I suspect that whomever had this before me was trying to solve this problem by replacing every wax paper capacitor in the thing because the internet says so. It didn't work.

Regardless, it has a good CRT and power transformer and other unobtainable items. Hopefully someone can use it. I have no interest in taking it further, I just wanted to see if it worked.

I posted about this some months ago: https://poal.co/s/oldtechnology/774380 I finally decided to try and bring it up, as I'm cleaning things out in preparation for donating unneeded things to a local place that auctions stuff off for operating funds. I decided not to use my death cheater but instead soldered a power cord to the input connections. I just rawdogged it right to the isolation transformer. To my surprise, it came up - but no sweep, no movement of any sort, just a dot. I suspect that whomever had this before me was trying to solve this problem by replacing every wax paper capacitor in the thing because the internet says so. It didn't work. Regardless, it has a good CRT and power transformer and other unobtainable items. Hopefully someone can use it. I have no interest in taking it further, I just wanted to see if it worked.
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[–] • 2 pts

An oscilloscope allows you to see a visual representation of a signal.

For example, you have an amplifier that sounds...off...to you. You connect the oscilloscope to the output and you can visually see the signal coming out. If you know what's going in, you can see if it's changed in some way to make it sound bad to you, and track back through the device to identify where it's happening.

It has other uses in radio and beyond where you can't hear a signal (or it wouldn't make sense if you could) but seeing it allows you to identify and work with it.

[–] • 1 pt

Thanks that's the best explanation I've come upon so far.