Patent ID: 7835259

Claim:
An apparatus for automated acquisition of a quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signal comprising: a means (A) for Performing an automatic gain control (AGC) operation on said incoming QAM signal to maintain a steady amplitude of said QAM signal; a means (B) for Performing a symbol timing recovery of said input QAM signal by adjusting a sampling clock of said symbol timing recovery loop; a means© for Performing a Blind Equalization of said QAM signal without carrier lock to minimize a dispersion error of said received QAM signal constellation as compared with an error-free QAM signal constellation by adjusting a set of coefficients of said equalizer; a means (D) for performing a carrier recovery of said QAM signal to eliminate a residual carrier frequency error and to eliminate a phase error from said acquired QAM signal; and a means (E) for Performing a decision directed equalization (DDE) of said QAM signal by updating a set of coefficients of said equalizer by using a decision based algorithm.