ITC/USA 2011 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Seventh Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 24-27, 2011 / Bally's Las Vegas, Las Vegas, Nevada / Current IRIG standards provide guidelines for system phase noise and several manufactures provide receivers and transmitters that perform within this standard. However, legacy receivers and transmitters that do not meet the current IRIG standards are sometimes still used during a mission. This paper will address how phase noise outside of the current IRIG standard affects the performance of an FM data link when using a trellis demodulator, as well as the performance of an SOQPSK data link in a high phase noise environment. Bit error rate performance and test results at several different rates with various phase noise masks are presented in this paper.