Limiting the Impulsive Noise in a PLL

This paper analyzes the operation of a phase-locked loop (PLL) preceded by a bandpass limiter (BPL) in the presence of impulsive noise. It is shown that the effect of the limiter consists essentially in a change of the statistics of the pulse strengths of the noise, so that the behavior of a BPL + PLL can be deduced from that of a simple PLL by suitable adjustment of the noise model. It is found that the limiter greatly enhances the PLL performance by reducing both the phase-error variance in the loop and the probability of cycle slippage. Finally, the design of the filter of the BPL is discussed, resulting in the conclusion that the best results are obtained by using a singletuned RLC circuit.