The Life of Kenneth: HP 5328A Universal Counter Teardown.

Last quarter I decided that I needed a good universal counter for a few of the projects I had in mind for this summer.  A universal counter contains a high quality time reference, which it uses to measure and count external events for you.  The simplest example is to count frequency; the universal counter resets a counter, waits a second, and then saves the value counted up to.  This count would be the number of cycles in one second, commonly refereed to as Hertz.  There are numerous other function available on these, including measuring the period of a signal (which is the inverse of Hertz), measuring the interval between two events on different signals, or the ratio between two different frequencies.