The paper compares nine methods of measurement of the phase difference of digitized sinusoidal noised signals according to their sensitivity to sampling non-integer number of signal periods. The investigated methods can be classified into four groups - modifications of classical zerocrossing based measurements, DFT-based measurements, virtual vector voltmeter and modifications of sine-wave fit algorithm. Results of both simulations and measurements are presented.

The paper presents accelerated impedance spectrum measurement method, oriented for measuring the quality of anticorrosion coating, modelled by a linear equivalent circuit. The method is based on applying multisine stimulation signal. Both stimulation and object response are analysed in frequency domain by digital filter bank. The theoretical description of method and a proposition of measurement methodology are presented. The simulation results are discussed, concerning spectrum calculation error and acceleration of measurements for several shape-designed multisine signals.

The paper deals with the test signal selection to be adopted for the Voice Quality Measurement (VQM) in telecommunication networks. It is proposed to use the optimized multisine as test signal in place of both the natural and the artificial voices, suggested by the ITU-T recommendations. The effectiveness of the optimized multisine to the VQM is investigated by using four algorithms: (i) Perceptual Speech Quality Measurement, (ii) Perceptual Speech Quality Measurement plus, (iii) Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality, and (iv) Perceptual Analysis Measurement System. Numerical tests are performed in order to compare the output index of the four algorithms feed by the optimized multisine, the natural and the artificial voice signals. In order to take into account the effects of the actual telecommunication networks, the Modulated Noise Reference Unit is used to corrupt both the multisine and the voices. The tests show the effectiveness of the proposed approach, based on the use of the optimized multisine, respect to the traditional procedures.

The use of medians as filtering windows in digital signal processing is known since many years and applied especially when linear filters could not be used, because of specific character of disturbances which are to be removed. This is the case, if, for instance, impulsive disturbances, having very wide spectra, are observed, and linear filters are not suitable for their elimination. Median procedures, including also weighted medians, are particularly effective in such filtering procedures. According to the applied algorithm, disturbed signal samples are eliminated and replaced by some values resulting from neighbouring nondisturbed samples [2]. In spite of the nonlinear character medians can be characterized in the frequency domain if a certain "harmonic linearization" is done. An analysis of such median characteristics in onedimensional case was given in [1, 4]. This idea is now extended to two-dimensional (2D) signals and the frequency properties (amplitude and phase) of the most popular 2D median filtering procedures are examined.

During last years, ion track technology has attracted considerable attention. This technology uses as support polymer foils irradiated with ion beams produced by heavy ions accelerators. Accelerated ions passing through these foils produce latent ion tracks by breaking the polymer chains [1]. Latent ion tracks can be selectively removed by chemical etching and obtain nanopores with diameters going down to 10nm. Nanopores can be used as they are or can be filled with metals to obtain nanowires [2]. Both, the etching process and the electrodeposition can be performed in the same electrochemical two-compartment cell, the polymer foil being positioned between them. To control the etching or the deposition process an electric setup must be arranged. The cell configuration is different for etching or growing, but the setup is very similar. It includes a computer with data acquisition board, a picoamperemeter and the electrolytical cell. This configuration is equivalent with a potentiostat but with the possibility to apply different waveforms and to store large amount of data without overloading the computer.