[time-nuts] How does sawtooth compensation work?

[Mark Sims]

The Tektronix TM509/5009 (and I think the 5010) counter modules have a National Semiconductor noise generator chip in them.  It injects noise into the counter to get around counter oscillator/input frequency synchronization.  I was once given a TM509 with a bad noise generator chip...   Some Very Smart People spent ages thinking the problem was in the device they were working on until they tried a different counter.  The Very Smart People (too smart to RTFM)  could never figure out why the counter was flakey and finally tossed it.  A little dumpster diving a few minutes with a scope yielded a very nice little counter.

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> Universal timer/counters and equivalent time sampling DSOs can have
this problem when their timebase ends up synchronized with the signal
they are measuring.