An improved lock detector for phase-locked communication receivers

A quadrature lock detector is incorporated in almost all coherent radio communication receivers. This commonly-used receiver subsystem is comprised of a quadrature phase detector that drives a low-pass filter, the output of which is subjected to a user-specified threshold to make a lock/unlock decision. Signal acquisition and phase lock are declared if an above threshold condition is observed. Unfortunately, this method of lock detection may yield a positive lock indication when the receiver is false locked; i.e., a classical quadrature lock detector may generate a false-positive lock indication. This tendency to produce an incorrect lock indication can be reduced significantly by using the new lock detector algorithm that is described here. Compared to the classical quadrature lock detector, the new lock detector is better able to differentiate between true phase lock and anomalous false lock. The classical quadrature lock detector is a simple, first-order approximation of the new lock detector algorithm. That is, the new lock detector algorithm consists of a classical quadrature detector that is augmented by a correction term.