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FFT of a Zero-Padded Sinusoid

Looking back at Fig.8.2c, we see there are no negative dB values. Could this be right? Could the spectral magnitude at all frequencies be 1 or greater? The answer is no. To better see the true spectrum, let's use zero padding in the time domain (§7.2.7) to give ideal interpolation (§7.4.12) in the frequency domain: 

zpf = 8;            % zero-padding factor
x = [cos(2*pi*n*f*T),zeros(1,(zpf-1)*N)]; % zero-padded
X = fft(x);         % interpolated spectrum
magX = abs(X);      % magnitude spectrum
...                 % waveform plot as before
nfft = zpf*N;       % FFT size = new frequency grid size
fni = [0:1.0/nfft:1-1.0/nfft]; % normalized freq axis
subplot(3,1,2);
% with interpolation, we can use solid lines '-':
plot(fni,magX,'-k'); grid on;
...
spec = 20*log10(magX); % spectral magnitude in dB
% clip below at -40 dB:
spec = max(spec,-40*ones(1,length(spec)));
...                 % plot as before
Figure 8.4: Zero-padded sinusoid at frequency $ f=0.25+0.5/N$ cycles/sample. a) Time waveform. b) Magnitude spectrum. c) DB magnitude spectrum.
\includegraphics[width=\twidth]{eps/example3}
Figure 8.4 shows the zero-padded data (top) and corresponding interpolated spectrum on linear and dB scales (middle and bottom, respectively). We now see that the spectrum has a regular sidelobe structure. On the dB scale in Fig.8.4c, negative values are now visible. In fact, it was desirable to clip them at $ -40$ dB to prevent deep nulls from dominating the display by pushing the negative vertical axis limit to $ -300$ dB or more, as in Fig.8.1c (page [*]). This example shows the importance of using zero padding to interpolate spectral displays so that the untrained eye will ``fill in'' properly between the spectral samples.
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Use of a Blackman Window
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FFT of a Not-So-Simple Sinusoid