[time-nuts] Re: Counter internal resolution error

[Demetrios Matsakis]

I don’t know how SR counters are today, but when we were upgrading our infrastructure over a decade ago we found other counters had better linearity.  Rover et al’s open source article has a good discussion of these issues, although of course you need to have one if you are going to experiment.  See   G. D. Rovera, M. Siccardi, S. Romisch, and M. Abgrali, “Time delay measurements: estimation of the error budget”, Metrologia 56, 2019 035004

> On Mar 17, 2023, at 9:46 AM, Magnus Danielson via time-nuts <time-nuts at lists.febo.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Michael,
> 
> On 2023-03-16 08:17, Michael Wouters via time-nuts wrote:
>> Dear time-nuts
>> 
>> Counter specs often include an “internal resolution” error. For example,
>> the SR620 specs say that it is 25 ps in single-shot, but this can be
>> reduced to 4 ps with sufficient, repeated measurements. Can anyone    offer
>> any enlightenment as to the origin of this error, and the statistical
>> distribution it has? I mentioned the SR620 but information about the 53230A
>> would be interesting too.
> 
> First of all, the single-shot resolution is somewhat of a hallmark measure when it comes to counters.
> 
> The interpolator resolution is part of this, but consider that there exists non-linearities in the interpolator which makes the error larger. I recall there being a plot of the non-linearity in the SR620 manual.
> 
> It is not uncommon to have interpolator resolution better than non-linearities, but the later may be more subtle to most.
> 
> Averaging can help, but depending to specifics, it's hard to give a number.
> 
> Cheers,
> Magnus
> 
>> 
>> Cheers
>> Michael
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