Technique for acquiring timing and frequency synchronization for modem utilizing known (non-data) symbols as part of their normal transmitted data format

A signal processing scheme through which the receiver may, at any time, synchronize or resynchronize itself to the transmitted data signals that are received over a dynamic dispersive channel. At the transmitter, bursts or sequences of known symbols are interleaved with unknown data. At the receiver incoming frames of signals (containing interleaved bursts of known data and unknown data) are processed in a manner similar to the processing of spread spectrum encoded data. A replica (or respective replicas) of the known signal burst(s) is (complex) correlated with the incoming signal to locate and lock onto a known (PN) reference symbol burst. Once a known symbol block has been located, a symbol rate clock (bit sync) is adjusted to track out any offset in the timing used for sampling the received data. This is followed by coarse and fine frequency offset adjustments to enable the local oscillator to lock onto the transmitted frequency.