As part of a continuing research in the area of adaptive modulation, the authors have taken a step back and re-examined the principles of carrier recovery, which had been identified as one of the critical functions within an adaptive demodulator, and ways in which that process could be made truly universal with a goal of having the recovery loop digitally controllable. Both generalised Costas loops and the loop with digital baseband signal processing have been considered, adapted to the requirements of the authors' research and simulated in the Signal Processing WorkSystem (SPW) DSP simulation package. In this paper, the authors outline the basic principles of universal carrier recovery as required by the concept of adaptive modulation and describe the simulation model, operation and performance of the final solution for the universal base-band loop. (6 pages)