Counting Pulses

Author: J.B. Hoag

There are many occasions which demand the counting of a succession of events which occur rapidly one after the other, such as the number of packages passing a given point each second along a conveyer belt, or the number of atmospheric static pulses picked up in a receiver each second, or the number of smashed fragments of an atomic disintegration, or the number of alternations in a cyclic current (frequency counting), etc. A simple thyratron counting circuit was described elsewhere.

The impulses which are to be counted may come from a microphone, a photocell, a manually or motor operated switching device, an iconoscope, a Geiger-Mueller tube (detecting elementary atomic particles) , the power supply line, an audio oscillator, etc. The pulses may be of constant amplitude and equally spaced; they may be of constant amplitude and irregular spacing; of variable strength but constant spacing; or they may be entirely random in nature.

1 Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, March 1942.