Digital terrestrial television broadcasting - designs, systems and operation [Book Review]

My brand new super toaster, where I occasionally warm (or actually burn) up my morning bread, does not have a single digital electronics component or brilliant add-on functions just short strips of resistive wire, a mechanical switch, and a bimetallic spring all housed in an ugly plastic enclosure. But the bits are marching in!!! One of the most controversial application areas of “marching bits” must be digital television or Digital Video Broadcasting, (in short, DVB), which is being pushed to the market by several enterprises and network operators -just the way we are getting DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) instead of FM stereo or vintage AM for the radio news. Whereas most of us have been used to a slightly smudged NTSC, PAL or SECAM video, transmitted over a fading and interference-covered radio channel, in the near future we will meet OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) and MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) improvements with hardly any noticeable changes in the content. Anyhow, due to the digital era in the studios and television centres, instead of reading on our screens a black-and-white still-camera shot “Sorry for the delay we are loading the film projector” which happened in the late 1950s; the coming years will give us “Sorry for the delay we are (again) booting out server.’’ Probably the broadcasting community got a late wake-up call; even after that it was sluggish in its response. In past decades, television broadcasting (and FM radio, as well) has been an autonomous field at least in Europe and there have been really vanishing (if any) connections at all to general telecommunications where things have made fast progress. In many also western countries, the governmental “touch” to TV has been strong, and political issues have had their unavoidable influence on the technical development of transmission systems. Although there have been, since the 1980’s, a number of evaluations of quality, capacity, and service enhancements for terrestrial television, including Teletext, D2-MAC (in Europe), HDTV (High Definition TV) and ATV (Advanced TV) in the US, only the rapid introduction of digital multimedia has been a strong enough external force to initiate any reasonable change. The drive has been of both a technical nature (similar to the case when people started getting better sound reproduction from their CDs compared to original FM stereo) and, at the same time, a question of taste. One can watch “Gone with The Wind” for the 101” round at anytime from a high quality DVD (Digital Video Disc). This practical reference book, Digital Terrestrial Television Broadcasting Designs, Systems and Operation by Paul Dambacher from Germany, is focused mainly on the systems technology of vision broadcasting, its latest developments, basic theoretical questions, and related measurements. The publisher, Springer Verlag, considers the text to be suitable both for engineers, students of communications engineering, and those media exeperts who work within the broadcasting community. A total of eleven separate chapters is included, with some 130 illustrations (mainly line drawings), about 120 references, a very useful list of abbreviations, and an alphabetical index. After the historical introduction in Chapter 1, the present state of terrestrial analog television is discussed both from the point of program distribution and transmitters but with relatively limited comments on well-known weaknesses. Interestingly, a short listing of analog measurements has been seen as important. In Chapter 3, the main elements of digital television are described (which means MPEG for baseband and OFDM for the modulation and RF) while the specifications for these are in Chapter 4. The next three chapters are devoted to program feeds, DVB transmitter fundamentals (with those cute little water-cooled power tetrodes), and a number of measurement questions. Following these, the very problematic issue of synchronization of transmitter systems is in Chapter 8, and coverage or network planning in Chapter 9. The crystal ball is given a glance for some future prospects in Chapter 10 and a very short summary follows. The author, Dr. Paul Dambacher, has a professional background in television and sound technology extending across more than thirty years. His career has grown within the famous Rohde & Schwarz (R & S) Company, of Munich,