In a drift tube partitioned into a plurality of cascaded drift tube segments each followed by an ion elimination region, for any integer M greater than 1, a method of separating ions repeats the following multiple times to cause only ions entering the drift tube that have a predefined ion mobility or range to traverse the drift tube: for each integer N beginning with 1 and sequentially advancing to M, establishing for a time duration an Nth electric repulsive field in the Nth ion elimination region and in every following Mth ion elimination region and an Nth electric drift field in each remaining ion elimination region and in each drift tube segment while deactivating for the time duration all non-Nth electric drift fields and non-Nth electric repulsive fields in each of the ion elimination regions and drift tube segments.