Super Seeing from Antarctica

A correlator for detecting unique words in satellite communications systems operating in a burst communications mode variably weights the bits in the unique word inversely to the probability of bit error in the received unique word. The probability of bit error is greater for bits at the front end of the unique word because they may occur before the receiver circuits lock onto the received burst. Consequently, according to the weighting scheme the bits at the front end of the unique word are assigned weighting functions which are less than those assigned to the bits at the rear end of the unique word.