A method is described for suppressing the long tails which appear when signals are transmitted through cables. The principles of tail suppression are presented in a general frame and may be applied to various pulse transmission systems. The determination of the passive compensating filters is obtained by approximating the system impulse response with a convolution product, one factor being completely invertible. The compensating networks are realized by cascading impedance matched (50–50 &OHgr;, for instance) bridged T type filters of easy construction. For a 105 m long RG‐8 cable the 10 to 90% risetime was reduced from 18 to 2.5 nsec using only two filters, with a total attenuation of factor 2. It is shown that, in favorable cases, once an optimal filter for a given cable is found, other filters may be deduced from it for similar cables of different length and diameter (RG‐8 and RG‐58 C, for example); the theory and the measurement technique of the corresponding scaling factors are described. Various other applications are shown, including the compensation of an air cable in the subnanosecond region.