A receiver comprises an adaptive filter having an input for a digitized input signal, means for storing a pre-designed filter characteristic, means for analyzing a digital. Generally planar, rectangular battery cells are moved from an as-received generally vertical stacking orientation to a generally horizontal stacking orientation without the need for robotic pick-and-place equipment. Also, a tagging efficiency is measured for each blood vessel based on the applied encoding scheme. Adjacent pairs of data signal channels are each separated with an empty wiring channel. The drop formation device is selectively actuated to form discrete functional liquid drops in the carrier liquid flowing down the slide surface.