Dear members, I am analyzing a signal in matlab by taking its fft. The singal has 200 samples and I am currently taking nfft = 256. I understand that this would result in zero padding. Now, I want to try to reduce the nfft to 128, 64 etc. I wanted to ask what should I expect to happen with the fft. Matlab says for Y = fft(X,n) If X is a vector and the length of X is greater than n, then X is truncated to length n. What would this actually result in? Can anyone explain, please? Thanks in advance.
You will get a reduced frequency resolution, and, depending on your input vector, windowing artifacts (you can consider truncation as equivalent to applying a rectangular window).
You may also use Nfft = 200 I think in matlab you can use any number Nfft which is a factor of 2,3,5. It is not neccesary to use Nfft = 2^n, You may also use Nfft=200=2*2*2*5*5 Most fft librraries are able to use these numbers of Nfft (fftw, kissFFT ..)