Also known as: Floyd Gardner, Floyd M. Gardner, Fred Gardner

Floyd M. Gardner was an engineer and author whose work on phase-locked loops — and the Gardner timing-error detector — underpins modern digital symbol-timing recovery.¹ His book Phaselock Techniques is a standard reference.

Gardner's detector uses a midpoint and a peak sample per symbol to drive timing recovery.

Contribution

The Gardner detector is prized because it works without carrier phase lock, making it a common choice in SDR demodulators (it features in several GopherTrunk decoders).

Sources

1. Floyd M. Gardner — Wikipedia, for biography and his work on phase-locked loops and timing recovery. ↩

See also

• Gardner timing recovery
• Clock recovery
• Mueller–Müller timing recovery

Learn it step by step

• Clock recovery & symbol timing