Frames of translates

We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a subfamily of regularly spaced translates of a function to form a frame (resp. a Riesz basis) for its span. One consequence is that ifthetranslates are taken only from a subset of the natural numbers, then this family is a frame if and only if it is a Riesz basis. We also consider arbitrary sequences of translates and show that for sparse sets, having an upper frame bound is equivalent to the family being a frame sequence. Finally, we use the fractional Hausdorff dimension to identify classes of exact frame sequences.