A disc serving as a spatial radiation modulator has dispersed radiation filters thereon. Each filter has a transmittance or reflectance modulation function of the form sin2(mnullnullpnullr/4), where m is a positive integer and p has one of the four values 0, 1, 2, 3. A radiation beam including selected wavelength components is diffracted into an elongated image dispersed according to wavelength. Different wavelength components are focused onto different filters on the modulator and are encoded by correspond filters. Since the modulation functions of the filters are orthogonal to one another, it is possible to extract the amplitude of each wavelength component after it has been encoded or modulated by corresponding filter from the total detected signal during one measurement.