Ground busting

[PurelyNonsense]

I always seem to forget this and I don't have anyone around here with enough knowledge to give me a straight answer. Why is it that you would ground bust certain equipment. I'm working on a voltage detector and the AF procedure says to make sure that the Oscilloscope is ground busted before connecting as it will damage or destroy equipment. Is this due to the fact that the TI does not have an earth ground itself?

[CalLabSolutions]

I am not an expert here..  But I think it is because the input ground is not tied to Earth Ground.  The input float.  So they could hold a static charge large enough to pop the FET on the inputs..

Either way it always good practice to have wrest strap on or at the very least touch the chaise before touching the inputs.

[N79]

Multichannel oscopes are usually referenced to ground (input shells are grounded through the power cord). Single channel scopes may or may not be referenced to ground. Anyway, when two or more instruments in a measurement setup are referenced to multiple grounds that are at different potential (say, due to them being plugged in on separate circuits or even plugged in just a few feet apart) it will cause offset errors in your measurements due to ground loops. Sometimes it may be necessary to use a cheater plug so that all instruments in the setup are referenced to the same ground. This can potentially create some pretty dangerous and damaging conditions if working with a normally earth-referenced oscilloscope though, so I'm surprised the procedure would call for that. Just think if your ground clip on an unused oscope channel's probe is touching a hot part of a circuit-- it would place the entire chassis at that potential. Scopes with true differential inputs don't have this problem... you can use them like you would a multimeter.

[PurelyNonsense]

Thanks for the great info! I'll probably forget it later but I'll keep all of it mind as long as I can