We consider soft-output detection of a binary continuous phase modulation (CPM) generated through a low-cost transmitter, thus characterized by a significant modulation index uncertainty, and sent over a channel affected by phase noise. The proposed detector is designed by adopting a simplified representation of a binary CPM signal with the principal component of its Laurent decomposition and is obtained by using the framework based on factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm. It does not

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... uire an explicit estimation of the modulation index nor of the channel phase and is very robust to large uncertainties of the nominal value of the modulation index. Being soft-output in nature, this detector can be employed for iterative detection/decoding of practical coded schemes based on a serial concatenation, possibly through a pseudo-random interleaver, of an outer encoder and a CPM modulation format.