Noise Performance of a Gated Phase-Locked Loop

The objectives of this paper are two. The first is to show that a gated phase-locked loop (GPLL) is a tracking device whose operation approximates that of a maximum likelihood estimator of the phase of a pulsed sinusoid imbedded in noise. The second is to determine the behavior of theb loop in the presence of noise. It is found that the loop performance is equivalent to that of a continuous phase-locked loop driven by the same noise, plus a continuous sinusoid which has the same power as the pulsed sinusoid at the input of the GPLL.