Electronic – Can sampling rate be a floating point number

frequencysamplingsignal processing

Suppose we have a sampling frequency for a signal of 15.5 samples/sec and we take samples for a period of 7 seconds. This means total samples are 108.5, does this make any sense?

Shouldn't the number of samples taken be an integer like 108 or 109? Or can the particular points in time from 0 second to 7 seconds on which to take the samples be determined in this case? How would one do that?

Best Answer

Forget sampling rate for a few seconds... Think about sampling period for a second, which is the time interval between two consecutive samples. This time can be an integer or any real number (as long as it’s positive, of course).

Sampling rate is simply the inverse of sampling period. Does it make more sense this way?