Szalai et al. (SIAM J. on Sci. Comp. 28(4), 2006) gave a general construction
for characteristic matrices for systems of linear delay-differential equations
with periodic coefficients. First, we show that matrices constructed in this
way can have a discrete set of poles in the complex plane, which may possibly
obstruct their use when determining the stability of the linear system. Then we
modify and generalize the original construction such that the poles get pushed
into a small neighborhood of the origin of the complex plane.