[email protected] wrote:

Hi Bob,

Bessel filters do have wonderful group delay characteristics, and a bandpass
version is entirely mathematically realisable...but not especially useful.

I was not planning to use one.  My query was about apparent lack of a
band pass version being mentioned in text books.

The skirts of such a filter are so gentle that there is little point in using
it for communications audio filtering unless you used many, many stages.  If
you were to do that, however, the inevitable minor defects in the physical
realisation would likely result in phase characteristics little better than a
simpler Butterworth design of comparable steepness.

Yes.  It seems the stagger tuned Butterworth is the design to go for.

It is not an absolute requirement to have linear phase over the entire band
of interest; only enough of it to allow the shape of the more-or-less square
wave envelope to be reproduced without excessive overshoot.  (This could be
as little as 50 Hz of the overall bandwidth for normal CW.)  We have been
using brick-wall highpass and lowpass filters in broadcast audio paths for
some time now, exhibiting virtually no ringing or overshoot.  This is done
partly by incorporating active phase shift networks to compensate for the
normal huge group delay excursions in the elliptical designs needed to
achieve the required rolloff characteristics.  Alas, design formulae for some
of the fancier implementations are hard to come by.

73,
John KD4IDY

What I am not sure of is how to stagger the stages of bandpass active
filters.  However, they can easily be tweaked, and applying "input
beeping" and using a scope to minimise ringing in the output seems to be
a good experimental way of adjusting it for the desired characteristic.

Thanks for the comments.

Bob ZL2CA