Carrier Recovery

Carrier Recovery

A carrier recovery system is a circuit used to estimate and compensate for frequency and phase differences between a received signal's carrier wave and the receiver's local oscillator for the purpose of coherent demodulation.

In the transmitter of a communications carrier system, a carrier wave is modulated by a baseband signal. At the receiver the baseband information is extracted from the incoming modulated waveform.

In an ideal communications system the carrier frequency oscillators of the transmitter and receiver would be perfectly matched in frequency and phase thereby permitting perfect coherent demodulation of the modulated baseband signal.

However, transmitters and receivers rarely share the same carrier frequency oscillator. Communications receiver systems are usually independent of transmitting systems and contain their own oscillators with frequency and phase offsets and instabilities. Doppler shift may also contribute to frequency differences in mobile radio frequency communications systems.

All these frequency and phase variations must be estimated using information in the received signal to reproduce or recover the carrier signal at the receiver and permit coherent demodulation.

Read more about Carrier Recovery:  Methods

Famous quotes containing the words carrier and/or recovery:

    When toddlers are unable to speak about urgent matters, they must resort to crying or screaming. This happens even with adults. The voice is the carrier of emotion, and when speech fails us, we need to cry out in whatever form we can to convey our meaning. Often, what passes for negativism is really the toddler’s desperate effort to make herself understood.
    Alicia F. Lieberman (20th century)

    With any recovery from morbidity there must go a certain healthy humiliation.
    Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)