A method and a highway addressable remote transducer (HART) modem for modulating and demodulating an analog signal including a HART message are provided. With low power consumption, the less computationally intensive HART modem modulates the analog signal using a coherent 8-ary phase shift keying (C8PSK) technique with a predefined gray code lookup table and a pre-generated sample lookup table having phase modulated digital signals indexed by index vectors, and transmits a HART C8PSK analog signal to sensor devices. A C8PSK demodulator in the HART modem demodulates the HART C8PSK analog signal by performing coarse estimation and fine estimation of phase errors and by estimation of a timing offset using a decision estimator. An automatic modulation classifier of the C8PSK demodulator validates presence of the analog signal in a C8PSK protocol by determining signs of in-phase and quadrature phase signals corresponding to each subsequent processed digitized sample of the analog signal.