A comb filter is a special type of notch filter in which the nulls occur periodically across the frequency band,

hence the analogy to an ordinary comb that has periodically spaced teeth. It has applications in a wide range of practical systems such as the rejection of power line harmonics, in the separation of solar and lunar components from ionosphere measurements of electron concentration and in suppression of clutter from fixed objects in moving target indicator radars. Consider a moving average (FIR) filter described by the difference equation ( ) The system function of this FIR filter is ( )
( )

C.1

C.2
)

C.3

And its frequency response is ( )

( ( )

C.4

From equation C.3 we observe that the filter has zeros on the unit circle at
( )

k= 1, 2, 3, , M

C.5

The pole at z=1 is actually cancelled by the zero at z=1, so that in effect the FIR filter does not contain poles outside z=0. A plot of the magnitude characteristics of equation C.4 clearly illustrates the existence of the periodically spaced zeros in frequency at k =2k/(M+1) for k=1,2,,M. Figure C.1 shows |H()| for M=10. We can create a comb filter by taking an FIR filter with system function ( ) ( ) C.6

and replace z by zL , where L is a positive integer. Thus the new FIR filter has a system function ( ) ( ) C.7

If the frequency response of the original FIR filter is H(), the frequency response of the FIR in equation C.7 is

C.8

Consequently the frequency response characteristics ( ) is simply an L-order repetition of ( ) in the range 02.Figure C.2 illustrates the relationship between ( ) and ( ) for L=5.

Now, suppose that the original FIR filter with system function H(z) has a spectral null at some frequency 0 .Then the filter with system function HL(z) has periodically spaced nulls at k=0+2k/L , k=0,1,2,,L1. As an illustration fig C.3 shows an FIR comb filter with M=3 and L=3.This filter can be viewed as an FIR filter of length 10, but only four of the 10 filter coefficients are non-zero. Let us now return the moving average filter with system function given by equation C.3.Suppose that we replace z by zL. Then the resulting comb filter has the system function ( ) And a frequency response ( ) This filter has zeros on the unit circle at
( )
( )

C.9

( ( )

C.10

C.11

for all integer values of k except k=0,L,2L,...,ML. Figure C.4 illustrates |HL()| for L=3 and M=10.

Figure C.2 Comb filter with frequency response HL() obtained from H()

Figure C.3 Realization of an Fir comb filter having M=3 and L=3

Figure C.4 Magnitude response characteristics for a comb filter with L=3 and M=10