Electronic – Differences between notch filter designs – use of op-amps

The first thing to do when looking to design a filter for a signal is to obtain the spectrum of the signal. This can be done in different ways. For example, you can measure or capture the signal with a scope. Most modern scopes can calculate an FFT of captured data and give a spectrum.

For a design though, it is nice to make an idealized waveform and then write the Fourier series of it. This way you get only the signal and no unwanted stuff, and so get a clean spectrum which will just be the coefficients of the harmonics. Then you can truncate or alter harmonic content (coefficient amplitudes) according to some filter type. Reconstruct a filtered signal from those altered coefficients and the filter effects will be evident.

From the comments of having a 5MHz carrier with ~1MHz BPSK, it is likely that many harmonics will be needed if a good representation of the original signal is desired. It wouldn't be surprising if 20 to 40 harmonics were needed for good representation. That would be a filter that started to roll off at > 20MHz, or maybe 40MHz. That's only 2 or 3 octaves from the 2 meter band (~150MHz). A filter with 1st order roll off isn't going to do that. You're going to need a filter with at least 3rd order performance for something like that. It's possible to get 2nd order performance out of a single stage Sallen-Key low pass filter.

As to the design shown in the schematic, it looks like the amplifiers are OK for what's being asked of them. LC filters are sensitive to termination. Best performance is when they are terminated into their characteristic impedance. The LC shown has \$Z_o\$ of 45 Ohms, and when used alone shows a resonant lobe of about 6dB. You can see the effects of impedance matching in case 4 when the LC is terminated into U2 with 100 Ohms. For a better match, R8 and R7 values could be halved, or L1 could be doubled and C5 could be halved.

Usually when active filters are used, inductors are not. It's because inductors are not needed to get complex poles and high Q roll offs, amplifier gain (and sometimes a little positive feedback, as in Sallen-Key) give that. Passive filters are good if the filter will be someplace where there is no bias voltage, or where frequencies and or filter order is high.

If you use this circuit on a regular basis I guess it would be worth to calculate its transfer function once and for all, so you can just easily evaluate it given the concrete component values. Doing the math you get (assuming an ideal OP)

$$H(\omega)=\frac{j\omega R_1C_1}{1+j\omega R_1C_1}\left(1+\frac{j\omega R_4C_2}{1+j\omega R_2C_2}\right)\tag{1}$$

A plot of (1) in dB with the specified component values looks like this (|H|/db vs f in Hz):

from which you can see that the -3dB point is at about \$250\,\text{Hz}\$.

If you further assume that

$$R_1C_1=R_2C_2=\tau$$

and if you denote the gain at large frequencies by

$$g=1+\frac{R_4}{R_2}$$

then with a bit more math you get this exact expression for the 3dB cut-off frequency in radians

$$\omega_c=\frac{1}{\tau}\sqrt{1-\frac{1}{g^2}+\sqrt{\left(1-\frac{1}{g^2}\right)^2+1}}\tag{2}$$

which with the given component values gives

$$\omega_c=2\pi\cdot 247.28$$

For a large gain \$g\gg 1\$, formula (2) is closely approximated by

$$\omega_c=\frac{1}{\tau}\sqrt{1+\sqrt{2}}\approx\frac{1.55}{\tau}\tag{3}$$