A Muli-Channel Combiner with Carrier-Offset Tracking

Suppose that a signal's bandwidth exceeds that of any available receiver, but that overlapping sub-bands of the signal are collected by multiple receivers that cover the entire signal bandwidth. An eigenanalysis method is described for reconstruction of the signal from the sub-bands. The technique produces rapid estimation of combining coefficients that maximize SNRs of combined "overlap" regions and consequently align them in phase. These coefficients are then sequentially applied to the appropriately frequency-shifted sub-bands. A two-channel version of the method has been implemented in both hardware and software and applied to signals of various digital modulation types. The outputs of the combiner suffered very little BER degradation from theoretical optima