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 is2/f_{c}and notT/2as published in the literature, where fcandTare 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.

The multipath channel for communication between an aerospace vehicle and a ground terminal is modeled by a multiplicative first-order Markov process. The multiplicative process is treated as a component of the message model and the discrete-time demodulation algorithms using the extended Kalman nonlinear estimation technique are developed for continuous-time angle-modulated signals. The equivalent baseband form of the demodulator structure is derived. Two examples of the message process are discussed for an FM system. The simulation results are presented for various values of the bandwidth expansion ratio and the additive SNR. The performance of the baseband algorithms is discussed.