Improved Frequency Accuracy of IFM Using Minimum Mean Squared Error Algorithm

In this paper, a new methodology for frequency calculation in Instantaneous Frequency Measurement (IFM) receiver is proposed. We introduce novel ideas in the digital domain for efficient processing of the output values of IFM's discriminators and having a higher accuracy for frequency measurement, instead of old works that usually deals with changing the discriminator's structures in RF domain. The idea of applying Minimum Mean Squared Error (MMSE) algorithm on the frequency calculation of the IFM system is explored. With this, we achieved RMS frequency error of 2.9 MHz in a 2 GHz bandwidth, while the best previous work had RMS error of 4.5 MHz in 1 GHz of bandwidth, which shows 3.1 times improvement. The simulation results are compared to the similar works and it shows that the idea of digital processing is more superior to the old method frequency calculations.