A programmable counter is described having three cascaded counters, the first one of which is a dual modulus prescaler. The second counter is a resettable binary counter which is fed information from a programmable read-only memory as to the numbers of times the prescaler divisions are to be repeated. The third counter is a binary counter which further divides the frequency and controls the repetition numbers delivered by the programmable read-only memory to the presettable binary counter.