Coverage aspects of digital terrestrial television broadcasting

The specification for digital terrestrial television, DVB-T, offers a wide range of potential applications: single transmitter and single-frequency networks, prohibited channel operation, portable reception, hierarchical transmission, etc. The network operator can select technical parameters such as the number of OFDM carriers, the length of guard interval, the degree of error protection and the modulation method. The last two parameters in particular allow the operator to reach a compromise between the number of programmes carried and their transmission reliability. This raises the question of which results, with regard to coverage, need to be achieved in each case.