Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] Costas loop lock?

[Tom Rondeau]

On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 4:56 PM, tom sutherland <address@hidden> wrote:
> Tom,
> I don't quite understand the use of the "Constellation Receiver" block. I
> have transmitter and receiver and I was trying to use the Costas Loop to
> replace the mixer section in the receiver to produce the I/Q signals needed
> by the16QAM demodulator. Since the signal I am wanting to demodulate is a
> real-signal and the Constellation Receiver accepts complex input, where does
> that signal come from? I have attached a simple diagram without filters.
> Tom


The image didn't really come through on your email.

I'm confused how you can do 16QAM with a real signal? You need phase
information for that.

Tom



> On Wednesday, October 23, 2013 10:37 AM, Tom Rondeau <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 9:30 PM, tom sutherland <address@hidden>
> wrote:
>> I am using a Costas loop for carrier recovery with QAM16 data. The carrier
>> is only 2khz. The I/Q output of the Costas loop seems to track (the
>> original
>> sin/cos of the modulating carrier's Frequency & Phase) steadily for a long
>> period (minutes) and then the Phase moves off, normally in +/-  45 or 90
>> degrees in one or both of the phases.  Any thoughts on why this occurs or
>> how I can fix this issue?
>> Thanks...Tom
>
>
> Tom,
>
> The Costas loop is not designed to handle QAM16. It only works for
> BPSK, QPSK, and 8PSK. My guess is that you are using an order 4 loop?
> What's probably happening is that the symbols at the four corners of
> the constellation are dominating the error calculations because they
> have the highest energy. But the loop can get biased by another symbol
> in the constellation that turns it to another phase lock. The Costas
> loop has no idea what the right constellation is; it's just minimizing
> an error function and has probably gotten trapped in a local minimum
> that your constellation presents to it.
>
> I would suggest turning instead to the constellation_receiver block.
> This allows you to specify the constellation you want it to handle.
> The constellation objects
> (http://jenkins.gnuradio.org/manual/doxygen/page_digital.html) allow
> you to specify a symbol mapping to a set of complex points. There are
> specialized forms of the constellations for certain known types (BPSK,
> QPSK, etc.) that have more computationally efficient decision making
> functions. But for any given constellation, it will at least be able
> to calculate the minimum Euclidean distance between each point. Slow
> but reliable.
>
>
> Tom
>
>