Improving SNR in Practice
All real measurements are disturbed by noise. This includes electronic noise, but can also include external events that affect the measured phenomenon — wind, vibrations, gravitational attraction of the moon, variations of temperature, variations of humidity, etc., depending on what is measured and of the sensitivity of the device. It is often possible to reduce the noise by controlling the environment. Otherwise, when the characteristics of the noise are known and are different from the signals, it is possible to filter it or to process the signal.
For example, it is sometimes possible to use a lock-in amplifier to modulate and confine the signal within a very narrow bandwidth and then filter the detected signal to the narrow band where it resides, thereby eliminating most of the broadband noise. When the signal is constant or periodic and the noise is random, it is possible to enhance the SNR by averaging the measurement. In this case the noise goes down as the square root of the number of averaged samples.
Read more about this topic: Signal-to-noise Ratio
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