A novel surface acoustic wave filter on a leakywave substrate is studied. It features a hiccup-type resonance occurring around a distributed gap between two long interdigital transducers. Compared to a classical coupled resonator filter, it enables a relatively narrow passband (1% to 2% of center frequency) with low insertion loss, steep skirts, and improved suppression levels. The structure consists of long transducers having the number of fingers greater than 1=K 2 and 1= , where K 2 is the coupling coefficient of the substrate material and is the reflectivity per wavelength, separated with short transducer sections constituting a distributed gap. A strong, localized resonance is formed in the gap region, in addition to the resonance arising in the long structures-hence, the name doubleresonance filter. The substrate studied here is 42 -rotated lithium tantalite. We show experimental results for both single-ended and unbalanced-to-balanced filters at 1.6 GHz, having a minimum insertion loss of 1.07 dB, suppressions of 30 dB, and absolute ;3-dB bandwidth of 29 MHz (1.9% of the center frequency). For the balanced device, the amplitude imbalance over the passband ranges from ;0.6 dB to 2 dB and the phase imbalance from 1 to 4.5 . Furthermore, we have measured the acoustical power distributions using a scanning laser interferometer, and we compare these results with the profiles simulated using a coupling-of-modes model.