A fast symbol timing recovery technique for PSK signals is presented. For the carrier recovery and for the symbol timing recovery subsystems, a parallel processing of the received modulated signal is employed. Theoretically it is shown that the optimum delay is

and not

as published in the literature, where f
cand

are the carrier frequency and the symbol interval, respectively. This technique has the advantage over the currently employed serial processing technique in faster acquisition of symbol timing and with it in faster overall system synchronization. Experimental verification of theoretical results is presented and applications in satellite and terrestrial microwave communication systems are discussed.