NOISE AVERAGING AND MEASUREMENT RESOLUTION (OR A LITTLE NOISE IS A GOOD THING )

When a continuous quantity is measured with a digital instrument or digitized for further processing, a measurement uncertainty component is incurred from quantization of the continuous variable. This uncertainty can be reduced by oversampling and averaging multiple measurements, but only if there is some noise on the measurand. In this article the optimum noise level is determined, and the subsequent improvement in measurement uncertainty calculated.