Sampling at the Nyquist Frequency

[Alec W]

I’ve been watching video explanation of the Nyquist Frequency for a sine wave. I can see how sampling at the Nyquist Frequency will prevent aliasing of the signal, however it seems to me that sampling at the Nyquist frequency could still easily result in a poor representation of the sinusoid if the sample times don’t fall on the peaks of the sinusoid. Could the sample points just happen to fall exactly on the points where the signal amplitude is 0, as these occur at frequently as the signal peaks do? Is there a method employed to prevent this from occurring?

[Simon]

Well-spotted! You are correct that signals close to the Nyquist frequency will not be very well represented. We’ll look at this in foundation lecture 2.

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