  The detectors in mass spectrometers are precise enough to count ion events.
In practice, the statistics of chemical noise are affected by large
quantization errors and overdispersion because of amplification in the
detector. The detector signal is modelled as X =floor(t N) where N represents
integer-valued ion counts and t represents the gain parameter. When t <= 1, the
gain parameter cannot be recovered without a priori information on N. When t >
1 however, we introduce compatible lattices and derive an estimator for t that
is optimal, independent of N and enables subsequent analyses of the ion counts.
