If the phase did not couple, then the frequency modulation we needed for our detection would not appear. This provided no result. It is apparent that our inability to detect the doppler shift hinged on the failure of our heterodyne detection. For reasons not entirely known, the system that we provided to mix and detect the modulation did not work. Several efforts to obtain explicit references in literature likewise did not work.
Several authors refer to the method, but make no mention as to how it is actually accomplished.
These are all questions that remain unanswered at this point.