tapering a clipped Waveform for Fourier analysis??? Need help!

Hello all, I have been working on some wave spectrum analysis using the fast fourier transform (FFT). For my analysis I need to only take the initial peak (first period or 1.5 period) of my waveform. However by clipping the waveform (down to this initial peak)high frequencies are added to the fft spectrum. I had been advised to eliminate this problem to taper the waveform out instead of clipping it, or maybe to clip then taper the clipped waveform???

Unfortunately I don t know how to go about this (Sad)...

Can anyone please help on how to do this? or if there is a better way to get around this problem???

Thank you so much for your time and help!

Answer 1

[Dr. Seis]

Check out the help pages for window

Example:

t = 0:0.1:10;
y = randn(size(t));
plot(t,y,t,window(@hamming,numel(t)),t,window(@hamming,numel(t)).*y');