Abstract: A low noise discriminator circuit having particular utility for use in determining the spectral purity characteristics of an rf signal source and comprising, in addition to standard discriminator components, a down-locked reference signal source including a voltage-controlled signal generator for developing a reference signal and a corresponding train of signal pulses, a stabilizing voltage-controlled oscillator which responds to the discriminator error signal and generates a stabilizing signal having a frequency at least an order of magnitude greater than the frequency of the reference signal, and a sampling phase detector which samples the stabilizing signal at the signal pulse frequency and develops a control signal which is fed through a feed-back loop to stabilize the reference signal generator.

Abstract: A threshold extension device for use in a frequency modulation demodulator circuit to minimize effects of impulse noise, usually referred to as "clicks", which normaly appear in the demodulated output signal, and including a delay line for delaying the demodulated signal, a follow and hold circuit for selectively omitting the click impulses from the delayed signal, a detector for detecting the occurrence of an event which will give rise to a click impulse in the demodulated signal, and a detector driven control signal generator for controlling operation of the follow and hold circuit.

Abstract: An improved squelch circuit for FM demodulators including a low pass filter for filtering out-of-band noise from the demodulator output signals, a delay line for time delaying the filtered signals, a gate for selectively passing the filtered demodulated output signals to an output terminal, and a control circuit for controlling the gate. The control circuit includes a high pass filter for passing the out-of-band noise in the demodulated signals, a detector for detecting the noise level of the noise passed by the high pass filter, and a comparator for comparing the detected out-of-band noise level to a reference to develop a gate control signal which causes the gate to be opened when the out-of-band noise level is relatively low and to be closed when the out-of-band noise level is relatively high.