PERFORMANCE COMPARISON OF SOQPSK DETECTORS: COHERENT VS. NONCOHERENT

Abstract

Shaped Offset Quadrature Shift Keying (SOQPSK) is a spectrally efficient modulation that has been promoted in the airborne telemetry community as a more spectrally efficient alternative for legacy PCM/FM. First generation demodulators for SOQPSK use coherent detectors which achieve good bit error rates at the expense of long synchronization times. This paper examines the performance of a noncoherent SOQPSK detector which significantly improves the signal acquisition times without impacting BER performance in the AWGN environment. The two detection methods are also compared in their ability to combat other channel impairments, such as adjacent and on-channel interference.