The scale of the endomorphism α of the totally disconnected, locally compact (t.d.l.c.) group G is a positive integer defined to be the minimum of the indices [α(U):α(U)∩U], where U ranges over the compact open subgroups of G. Existing methods for computing the scale draw on analogies with computing eigenvalues in linear algebra. These methods generally do not match the effectiveness of linear algebra however, the principal obstacle being the lack of a general description of t.d.l.c.~groups.