Bandwidth compression of noisy signals with square-wave subcarrier

This article discusses a method for downconverting the square-wave subcarrier of spacecraft signals, such as the one from Galileo, which results in a compression bandwidth that lowers the sample rate significantly. The study is focused on three issues. The first is the selection of an adequate down-mixing signal for the resulting signal to have a format similar to that of the original signal, except at a lower subcarrier frequency. The second is the control of the noise level so that the signal to noise ratio is not degraded due to the downconversion. The third is to determine the bandwidth of the downconverted signal considering the uncertainty of the residual carrier frequency.