Patent ID: 8787768

Claim:
A method for characterizing, in the presence of optical carrier phase noise, and compensating for deterministic phase nonlinearities and distortion inherent in radio frequency and optical components to modify time-bandwidth properties of a radio frequency waveform and synthesize a single sideband suppressed carrier optical waveform in the presence of random phase noise generated by an optical carrier source, the method comprising: mixing a modulated optical signal with a constant frequency optical signal in an optical coupler; optically heterodyning the mixed signal output from the optical coupler in a detector to produce a radio frequency waveform; digitizing the radio frequency waveform by an analog to digital converter to produce one or more digital waveform representations of the radio frequency waveform; comparing the digitized radio frequency waveform in a processor to known, theoretical phase history of a preselected continuous wave signal to measure distortion characteristics of the radio frequency modulated optical signal; and transforming the measured distortion characteristics to a baseband signal bandwidth by input-referred mapping by a bandwidth based scaling coefficient; wherein analyzed, characterized and transformed waveform distortion components of the digitized radio frequency waveform are used to pre-compensate the radio frequency waveform.