In the grand alliance (GA) HDTV receiver, a coherent detection is empolyed for coherent demodulation of vestigial side-band (VSB) signal by using frequency and phaselocked loop(FPLL) operating on the pilot carrier. Additional phase tracking loop (PTL) employed to track out phase noise that has not been removed by the FPLL in theGA system. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for phase detection which utilizes a weighting function. The simplest implementation of the proposed algorithm using te sign of the Q channel component can be tractable by imposing a phase detection gain to the loop gain. It is obserbed that the propsoed algorithm has a robust characteristic against the performance of the digital filters used for Q channel estimation. A second goal of this paper is to introduce a gain control algorithm for the PTL in order to provide an effective implementation of the proposed phase detection algorithm. And we design the PTL through the realization of the simplified digital filter for H/W reduction. The proposed algorithms and the designed PTL are evaluated by computer simulation. In spite of using the simplified H/W structure, simulation results show that the proposed algorithms outperform the coventional PTL algorithms in the phase detection and tracking performance.