Patent 7430247 was granted and assigned to Tektronix on September, 2008 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Carrier frequency detection for an N-ary modulated signal is achieved by digitizing the N-ary modulated signal, frequency shifting the digitized N-ary modulated signal to prevent aliasing, raising the frequency-shifted signal to the Nth power, transforming the raised signal to frequency domain data and determining an initial maximum frequency peak, iteratively fine shifting the frequency of the N-ary modulated signal around the initial maximum frequency peak and repeating the raising, transforming and determining steps to obtain a plurality of maximum frequency peaks, and calculating the carrier frequency from the maximum frequency peaks and the total related frequency shift.