New Design Techniques of Variable Prescaling Counters for Spaceborne Experiments

The design techniques of prescaling counters for the automatic compression of particle measure ment data on board of spacecrafts are reviewed and new criteria are proposed, which are illustrated by examples. The standard technique of realizing logarithmic counters is criticized and alternative procedures are proposed that take into account both the effect of the statistical error, when counting events from random sources, and the efficient use of all the apriori information available about the expected counts. The resulting structure consist of a prescaling counter, where the number of stages of the prescaler that are inserted does not coincide anymore with the content of the exponent section, but is an arbitrary function of that number.