The Effects of Self-Noise on Error Voltage of the Delay-Lock Discriminator

This paper deals with the effects of the correlation self-noise on the error voltage of a radio frequency (RF) delaylock discriminator. The error voltage at the output of the envelope correlation network is determined in terms of the spectral components of the maximal-length sequence and the frequency response of the bandpass filters used in the two channels of the correlation network. The slope of the error voltage in the lock-on state, which is readily obtained from the above analysis, is a quantity of particular interest, because the mean-square tracking error is inversely proportional to the square of the slope. The problem of the mismatch in the two channels of the correlation network is also considered.