Generating microwave signals with high spectral purity and stability is crucial in communication systems, radars, signal processing, radio astronomy, satellites, GPS navigation, spectroscopy, and in time and frequency metrology. Noise and interference are the single most important factors limiting the performance of existing signal processing systems. Systems that implement electronics-based Analogue-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) suffer from multiple noise sources, such as thermal noise and sampling jitter, the latter being particularly important for applications with high signal bandwidth since its effective noise scales linearly with signal. For this reason, ADC performance typically drops with high bandwidth driving up cost dramatically. To mitigate these issues, analog optical links offer a promising technology for applications such as radiofrequency (RF)-over-fiber, antenna remoting, and photonic assisted ADCs featuring reduced noise characteristics and resilience to electromagnetic interference. However, one of the primary limitations of intensity-modulated analog optical link technology is high noise figure stemming from successive electronic-to-optical and optical-to-electronic conversions. Many electro-optic modulation techniques exist that strive for high modulation efficiency by increasing modulation depth of the modulated RF signal resulting higher signal-to-noise ratio. However, fundamental limitations exist for all such technologies, resulting in tradeoffs in RF bandwidth, optical power handling, and/or insertion loss.