The use of adaptive decision feedback techniques in the joint estimation of data, carrier phase, and symbol timing is investigated for a 49-QPRS 90 Mbit/s digital radio. The performance of the carrier and timing recovery loops are analyzed, first in a multipathfree environment and then for the case of a multipath distorted signal and a fixed decision feedback equalizer. Finally, the joint problem of data recovery, estimation of carrier phase, and symbol timing for a

The performance of a 49-QPRS, 90 Mbit/s digital radio receiver equipped with a decision feedback equalizer (DFE) to counter multipath fading is investigated via computer simulation. The simulation includes the transmitted data, multipath fade model, receiver model, and DFE. The results indicate that a DFE equipped with five forward and five feedback taps can adequately compensate a 40 dB minimum-phase fade anywhere in the receiver passband. The study is extended to other receiver configurations including the use of space diversity and/or slope equalizers and the use of a transversal equalizer (TE) with the same delay-span in place of the DFE. The results indicate that the DFE equipped receiver outperforms the TE receiver and that still better performance may be achieved using a combination of space diversity and DFE.