WASHINGTON-A successful plug-fest in Baltimore, an impressive display of ATSC 3.0 technology at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, an FCC Public Notice requesting comment on a widely supported request to allow broadcasters' use of ATSC 3.0, and a packed 2016 ATSC Broadcast Television Conference- Countdown to Launch in Washington, D.C. in May indicates ATSC 3.0 may soon be coming to a TV or tablet near you!
TEST TRANSMISSIONS
ATSC 3.0 test transmissions are on the air now from Sinclair's experimental single frequency network (SFN) on Channel 43 in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Over-the-air ATSC 3.0 was on display at the NAB Show from two different transmitters, and multiple tests, including VHF over-the-air testing, have been conducted in Cleveland.
Manufacturers I talked to at the ATSC conference told me they are getting requests from several broadcasters for equipment for ATSC 3.0 tests, indicating we may see more ATSC 3.0 experimental test stations on the air later this year.
ATSC 3.0 transmissions, of course, aren't of much use unless there are receivers. One of the most significant ATSC 3.0 products I saw at the NAB Show was a chip a third of the size of a postage stamp-more about that later.
I remember sitting in sessions at the NAB convention and at the IEEE broadcast symposium two decades ago trying to figure out how PAT, PMT, PIDs, ETT, EIT, STT, VCT, etc., all fit together to create an ATSC DTV stream. How was I going to get this to the transmitter? Skeptics said Table 3, showing 18 different display formats for video, was overly complicated, but at least there was only one transmission format-8VSB at 19.39 Mbps. Now, in 2016, we're looking at a standard that offers an almost endless number of options for data rate and robustness and multiple ways to package and deliver content (or data) to viewers (or devices). It is complicated, but sessions at the NAB Broadcast Engineering Conference and a full-day tutorial before the ATSC Broadcast Television Conference helped prepare attendees for the new standard.
Perhaps the best way to learn is to put hardware together and see what works and what doesn't.
Plug-fests are important because they give manufacturers a way to see if their understanding of the ATSC 3.0 specifications are correct and whether a signal generated on manufacturers' equipment can be received on other manufacturers' equipment. The purpose of the testing is not to rate performance, but to see if there are parts of the specifications that need to be clarified or corrected and make sure manufacturers agree on how specific elements are generated and decoded. During the plug-fest manufacturers can update their code and retest as time allows. Reports of plug-fest results, even inside ATSC, do not identify manufacturers by name.
A unique feature of the Baltimore plug-fest was that participants had an over-the-air signal from Sinclair's experimental station they could use to check their receivers. One of the many elements checked in the Baltimore plug-fest was the ability to generate and decode layered division multiplexing (LDM) signals, an important feature in ATSC 3.0 that I described last year in RF Technology LDM-Stacking Signals for Improved Performance.
Fig. 1: Zenith Electronics, LG Electronics, Harmonic, Triveni, GatesAir, Dolby and Digital Alert Systems had a rack of equipment generating an ATSC 3.0 signal that included prerecorded and live content as well as AWARN emergency alerts
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WASHINGTON-A successful plug-fest in Baltimore, an impressive display of ATSC 3.0 technology at the NAB Show in Las Vegas, an FCC Public Notice requesting comment on a widely supported request to allow broadcasters' use of ATSC 3.0, and a packed 2016 ATSC Broadcast Television Conference- Countdown to Launch in Washington, D.C. in May indicates ATSC 3.0 may soon be coming to a TV or tablet near you!
