Frequency Measurements: How-To Guide

Frequency is the rate of recurrence of a cyclic or periodic event. In physics, you can observe periodicity in rotations, oscillations, and waves. For an analog or digital waveform, you can invert the signal period to obtain the frequency. The smaller the period, the higher the frequency and vice versa. This is illustrated in Figure 1, with the top waveform having the lowest frequency and the bottom waveform having the highest frequency.