Systems and methods are described that may be used to detect and correct carrier phase offset in a signal. A phase offset corrector receives an equalized signal representative of a quadrature amplitude modulated signal and derives a phase-corrected signal from the equalized signal. The equalized signal is sliced to obtain real and imaginary sequences and a frame synchronizer performs a correlation of the real and imaginary sequences with corresponding parts of a stored frame-sync pseudo-random sequence. Phase correction is based on the maximum real and imaginary values of the correlation. The signal is typically quadrature amplitude modulated signal is modulated using punctured trellis codes. Quadrature phase shift keying modulation, 16-QAM, 64-QAM and other QAM schemes may be used.