There is described herein a method of obtaining a measure of flow from an electromagnetic flow meter having at least one field generating coil and potential sensing electrodes. A composite excitation waveform is applied to the field-generating coil. The composite excitation waveform comprises at least two frequency components and a plurality of frequency components are simultaneously present for at least a portion of the waveform. The potential sensed by the potential sensing electrodes is sampled to produce a sampled output and the sampled output is correlated with a composite waveform based on the composite excitation waveform. The result of the correlating is used to derive a measure of flow.