FFT of a Zero-Padded Sinusoid

Looking back at Fig. 8.2c, we see there are no negative dB values. Could this be right? Could the spectral magnitude at all frequencies be 1 or greater? The answer is no. To better see the true spectrum, let's use zero padding in the time domain to give ideal interpolation in the frequency domain:

zpf = 8;            % zero-padding factor
x = [cos(2*pi*n*f*T),zeros(1,(zpf-1)*N)]; % zero-padded 
X = fft(x);         % interpolated spectrum
magX = abs(X);      % magnitude spectrum
...                 % waveform plot as before
nfft = zpf*N;       % FFT size = new frequency grid size
fni = [0:1.0/nfft:1-1.0/nfft]; % normalized freq axis
subplot(3,1,2);
% with interpolation, we can use solid lines '-':
plot(fni,magX,'-k'); grid on; 
...
spec = 20*log10(magX); % spectral magnitude in dB
% clip below at -40 dB:
spec = max(spec,-40*ones(1,length(spec))); 
...                 % plot as before

Figure: Zero-padded sinusoid at frequency $f=0.25+0.5/N$ cycles/sample. a) Time waveform. b) Magnitude spectrum. c) DB magnitude spectrum.

Figure 8.4 shows the zero-padded data (top) and corresponding interpolated spectrum on linear and dB scales (middle and bottom, respectively). We now see that the spectrum has a regular sidelobe structure. On the dB scale in Fig. 8.4c, negative values are now visible. In fact, it was desirable to clip them at $-40$ dB to prevent deep nulls from dominating the display by pushing the negative vertical axis limit to $-300$ dB or more, as in Fig. 8.1c. This example shows the importance of using zero padding to interpolate spectral displays so that the untrained eye will ``fill in'' properly between the spectral samples.