Acquisition and retrieval performance of the Tektronix TDS 2014 as a data logger

The Tektronix TDS 2014 is a four channel DSO (digital storage oscilloscope) with an RS232 port for remote administration. This document has been written to inform the reader how the oscilloscope can be operated as an automated voltage logger using a PC. We conducted some tests which confirmed that multiple channels of the oscilloscope could be synchronously captured if the trigger conditions in the DSO were configured appropriately. We also tested the serial transfer time of voltage samples, encoded in plain text and binary format. We discovered plain text encoding resulted in considerably longer transfer times compared with binary encoding and is therefore the least preferred method.