Frequency generators used to be very expensive. No more (for basic uses). Nowadays, a single chip does all the hard work. It runs off a fixed stable crystal oscillator, and it generates a sine wave of any frequency you want.

Here’s one I purchased off eBay recently – for under €40, including shipping:

Just hook it up to a 12V power brick and it’ll generate the sine wave on its BNC output connector. The push buttons let you move to a specific digit and increment or decrement that position. I haven’t figured out what the rightmost button does (the labels are in Chinese).

Here’s a 10 MHz signal, on the Rigol DS5062CA scope:

And here’s a 50 MHz sine wave, the maximum supported by the frequency generator:

Note that the amplitude is a bit lower. This is a 60 MHz scope, which means it’ll drop off 3 dB at 60 MHz. Decibels are a logarithmic scale, and “6 dB” is a funny way of saying “half” (so 3 dB is 71%). So in effect, the scope will still show the 50 MHz sine wave nicely, but it won’t be accurate in amplitude.

Scope bandwidth is a subtle thing. Once you know your scope has bandwidth X, you might be tempted to think that all is well up to that value, for any signal you look at. It doesn’t work that way, however (and far be it from scope vendors to tell you about that) – here’s a wake-up call: an ideal square wave requires infinite bandwidth to display accurately! The reason is that scopes aren’t inherently limited by bandwidth, but by how fast their input circuits can track an input signal (capacitance stores charge, and that hampers the way signals move around). So another way to look at how fast a scope can track a changing signal is to look at its rise time – which is usually also included in the specs. A perfect square wave has zero rise time, which no scope can match.

Before I veer too far off topic, let me just mention a rule of thumb, which says that if you want to accurately view square waves (such as logic signals!), then you need a scope with a bandwidth which is 10 times as high as the frequency of the signal you want to examine. To accurately view a 1 MHz logic signal, you need a 10 MHz scope – to display a 20 MHz square wave properly, you need a 200 MHz scope (this is unrelated to the “Nyquist frequency” BTW, which says that you need to sample with at least twice the rate of the signal to pick it up).

So this Rigol DS5062CA scope is suitable for sine waves up to 60 MHz if you can live with some amplitude loss, and it will show square waves fairly accurately up to 6 MHz, i.e. a 160 nS cycle time. It will sample up to 1 Gs/s, i.e. once every nanosecond (!), and it’ll display results down to about 5 ns/div, so the above samples you see are a bit deceptive: there are 320 pixels across, i.e. about 25 pixels per division, but only 5 measurements per division.

What this means is that the 50 MHz sine wave you’re seeing above is looking very nice, but mostly interpolated.

Fortunately, digital storage scopes usually have a couple more tricks up their sleeve. This one is more accurate:

I’ve turned off the grid and enabled “Analog” mode, which is a way to emulate the CRT beam of an analog scope – it only lights up where actual measurements have been made, and it’ll keep a few previous sweeps on the screen. Note that it’s slightly early w.r.t. triggering, which was set to exactly 0V. This is as good as it gets with this scope.

Anyone interested in “Direct Digital Synthesis”, i.e. how this nifty sine wave generator works?