Inconsistent cuts in MDF

It’s measured over the active time of the laser pulse during the test pattern.

My first thought was to capture those huge peaks, but the 100 mA/div scale pushed the rest of the pulse down into the noise:

The A and B cursors mark the RMS calculation gate time when the Enable / L-ON signal (magenta) is low.

So I cranked up the gain enough to see the tube current controlled by the PWM:

Plotting the measured RMS value against the PWM duty cycle input:

Because the tube current is mostly spikes below about 25% PWM, the lower RMS values don’t match that part of the plot from the power supply’s meter:

But everything matches closely enough to say that, yeah, that’s pretty much how the power supply behaves.

For completeness, a description of the test setup and scope traces:

That’s the Tek current probe clipped around the tube’s cathode wire near the power supply.