In free space optical communication, a beacon light loses too much energy after a long-distance transmission and faces strong interference from background light. The beacon light illuminated on a quadrant detector (QD) is so weak that the output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a QD is very low, which leads to a significant decrease in the accuracy of the direct position detection method. To solve this problem, an improved light spot position detecting method is proposed. Since the background light and the dark current noise are white noise, we could consider concentrating the energy of QD output signal at a certain frequency point to enhance the output SNR. Therefore, a cosine signal is used to modulate the intensity of a beacon light at the transmitting end. Then the QD output photocurrents are also cosine signals with the same frequency as the modulating signal. Putting the photocurrent signals into a cross-correlation operation with a reference signal, which is the same as the modulating signal, can enhance the QD output SNR at a certain frequency point. Unfortunately, the result of the classical cross-correlation is attenuated with increasing delay. It is hard to detect the amplitude of the classical cross-correlation result. So, we used cyclic cross-correlation to obtain a stable correlation result to detect its amplitude accurately. The experiment results show that even when the QD output SNR is less than −17 dB, the detection root-mean-square error of the proposed method is 0.0092 mm, which is a quarter of the direct position detection method. Moreover, this method only needs a small amount of data to accomplish the calculation and is especially suitable for real-time spot position detection.

In this paper, a new model called Allan variance based semi-parameter model is put forward to improve the pointing precision for alt-az telescopes. As for electro-optical tracking systems, the precision of line-of-sight (LOS) pointing is seriously influenced by both geometric and nonlinear error sources. In modeling part of the parameter model, a simplified mount model is set up to demonstrate impacts of geometric errors that are caused by imprecision during mechanical processes on LOS pointing, according to values of encoders and miss distances in charge-coupled-device (CCD) cameras. Considering the limitations of mount models, an improved hybrid model called the Allan variance based semi-parameter model is introduced to compensate for residual nonlinear errors in the calibration portion. Compared with the classical mount model, the Allan variance based semi-parameter model removes both geometric errors and nonlinear errors, and the LOS pointing precision has been remarkably improved after calibration of the proposed model.