Carrier arraying with coupled phase-locked loops for tracking improvement

Abstract

This paper considers a system that couples several phase-locked loops (PLL's) to improve carrier tracking performance. The system coherently combines the received carrier signals at geographically separated ground antennas to increase the total effective aperture. It automatically aligns the received carrier's phases to enhance received carrier signal-to-noise ratio. The tracking performance of this system is being assessed in terms of rms phase jitter.