Optimum Performance of Suppressed Carrier Receivers with Costas Loop Tracking

The performance of suppressed carrier receivers with Costas loop tracking is optimized by proper choice of loop arm filter bandwidth. In particular, it is shown that for a variety of passive arm filter types, there exists, for a given data rate and data signal-signal-to-noise ratio, an optimum filter bandwidth in the sense of minimizing the loop´s squaring loss. For the linear theory case, this is equivalent to minimizing the loop´s tracking jitter. When symbol synchronization is known, it is shown that by replacing the passive arm filters with active filters, i.e., integrate-and-dump circuits, one can achieve an improvement in carrier-to-noise ratio of as much as 4 to 6 dB depending on the passive arm filter type used for comparison and the value of data signal-to-noise ratio (SNR).