Reply to "How to measure signal strength on a MTH DCS based layout without using an MTH engine to perform this function?"

@turkey_hollow_rr posted:

You could probably measure the signal from a TIU running on aux power and track power turned off with an oscilloscope.

With track power off, the DCS signal is not present.

We had a long discussion about this topic in this thread: Design of a $10-20 DCS-TIU Port Tester Tool?

The upshot of it all was I laid out this board for a DCS signal tester.  It's designed to use for testing the TIU output signal strength, testing the signal on the tracks encompasses so many variables that it's pretty hard to do useful tests.

Note that for all these tests using a 'scope, you need to be supplying the TIU with a pure sine wave, the filter won't properly screen out any chopped waveform on the voltage.

If you want to test the signal directly with a 'scope, you'll need a filter, this is part of the board above.

Here's one that I made for portable measurements.