Digital Terrestrial TV to North American ATSC Standard

Abstract

Although terrestrial radio transmission poses a variety of problems due to multipath reception and is best handled using multicarrier methods (orthogonal frequency division multiplex — OFDM), North America opted in favour of a single carrier method under the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC). In the years 1993 to 1995, the Advanced Television Systems Committee — with the participation of AT&T, Zenith, General Instruments, MIT, Philips, Thomson and Sarnoff — developed a method for the terrestrial, and also cable, transmission of digital TV signals. The cable transmission method proposed by ATSC was not put into practice, and the J.83/B Standard was introduced instead. As in all other digital TV transmission methods, the baseband signal is in the form of an MPEG-2 transport stream. The video signal is MPEG-2 coded (MPEG: Moving Picture Experts Group); the audio signal is Dolby digital AC-3 coded. In contrast to DVB, high definition television (HDTV) was favoured in ATSC. The input signal to an ATSC modulator, therefore, is a transport stream with MPEG-2 coded video and Dolby AC-3 coded audio information (AC-3: digital audio compression). Video signals are either SDTV (standard definition television) or HDTV signals.