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Rockland Oceanographic Services Inc.

RGL Consulting Technical Note 004
April 26, 2004
Choosing the cut-off frequency of an anti-aliasing filter
April 2004.
Rolf Lueck
RGL Consulting Ltd. 3956 Sherwood Road, Victoria, BC, Canada, Rolf@rglscientific.com

Introduction
The Nyquist frequency of a regularly sampled signal is

1
2
N S
f f = (1)
where
S
f is the rate or sampling of the signal in samples per second. Any signal components
above the Nyquist frequency will appear at lower frequencies in the sampled signal and this
gives a misleading spectrum for the signal. To avoid such undesirable aliasing effects, the
signals are usually low-pass filtered before sampling. Instruments built by RGL Consulting
use an 8-pole, 6-zero, low-pass elliptic filter produced by Frequency Devices, Inc. (Model
DP68LEY-165). The response is shown in Figure 1.
The correct choice of the cut-off frequency of the low-pass filter is important. If the cut-off
frequency is too low, signal band-width is wasted. If the cut-off frequency is too high,
aliasing may occur. The filter used by RGL Consulting has a 2-to-1 cut-off band. This means
that signals between zero frequency and
C
f , the cut-off frequency, are not attenuated. The
pass-band transfer function (ratio of input to output amplitude) is between 0.995 and 1.000 in
this range of frequencies. For frequencies between and 2
C C
f f , the attenuation increases
rapidly with increasing frequency and reaches 105 dB at 2
C
f . For frequencies higher than
2
C
f , the attenuation varies but always exceeds 105dB. An attenuation of 105 dB is same as
an amplitude attenuation of 1:180000.
If we now choose a frequency
C
f such that there is absolutely no aliasing for frequencies
smaller than
C
f (that is, any signal aliased back to below
C
f is attenuated by at least 105
dB), then the Nyquist frequency must be exactly mid-way between and 2
C C
f f . We have the
mathematical relationship that
2 .
C N N C
f f f f = (2)
This means that

2
3
c
N
f
f
= (3)
for the particular filter used by RGL Consulting. Most instruments have a sampling rate of
512
S
f = samples per second, so the cut-off frequency should be 171 Hz. To allow for small
variation from ideal behavior of the filter modules, most instruments carry filters with a cut-
off of 165 Hz.


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Rockland Oceanographic Services Inc.

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DP68LEY 8Pole, 6Zero Elliptic, 2.00 LowPass Filter
Normalized Frequency f / f
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Figure 1. The amplitude frequency response of the Elliptic filter modules used with the RGL Consulting
filter boards. Frequency is normalized by the cut-off frequency,
c
f which is usually 165 Hz.

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