A soft decision directed phase detector suited to satellite communications at very low signal to noise ratio

The introduction of data redundancy for the purpose of carrier synchronization over a Gaussian channel may be a profitable operation. We present in this paper the performance of a phase detector suited to 8 PSK receivers, based on the soft decoding of a single parity-check code. It is shown that in presence of phase noise and a quite important frequency error, the proposed synchronization scheme outperforms the classical non-data-aided and decision-directed algorithms, reducing the phase jitter in considerable proportions.