bc,
you have complained of this before - if you are using the
commercial timer as is - with no changes or mods, there is no reason for
the output to be particularly noisy.
So I can imagine you are driving a computer interface, in some way?
That seems like a plausible mechanism - a device setting an interrupt
on a commercial operating system, for instance.
Or perhaps you are looking at very small noise overlays?
If this were the case, you would want to support the photo gate
with a space frame structure from the clock's back plate.
Steel wires, perhaps a reworked clothes hanger?
That would cut down the extraneous jitter from pendulum to photo gate vibration.
And you would want to examine the noise contribution in complete darkness,
to check for light born noise.
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I'm using a some what sophisticated photo gate** to measure the amplitude of
medium quality clock pendulum. [Q> 1k]
The data is very noisy -- is there a simple method to separate the jitter from
the flag and photo gate system from pendulum noise?