FSK RADIO-FREQUENCY DEMODULATORS

A demodulator for a digital radio receiver comprises a frequency discriminator and a Viterbi decoder. The frequency discriminator receives a series digital signal samples representative of an FSK-modulated signal and performs frequency discrimination on the digital signal samples to generate a series of frequency samples. Each frequency sample represents an instantaneous frequency of the signal in a respective frequency-sample period. There are an integer oversampling factor, N>1, of frequency-sample periods in each symbol period. The Viterbi decoder receives the series of frequency samples, determines branch metrics for each symbol period by determining distances between a vector of N successive frequency samples and each of a plurality of reference waveform vectors, each comprising N elements. It use the branch metrics in a Viterbi process to output demodulated symbol values corresponding to a maximum-likelihood decoding of the FSK-modulated signal.