Arqiva, which runs the UK’s digital terrestrial infrastructure for Freeview HD distribution, has chosen T-VIPS of Norway for equipment to monitor key transmitter sites in the country’s DVB-T2 network. T-VIPS is providing its TNS547, to simplify the monitoring and analysis of DVB-T2 transport streams and services throughout a terrestrial network.
It monitors major interfaces, formats and layers found in DVB terrestrial networks, enabling fast fault-detection and diagnostics through an intuitive user interface. It allows analysis and monitoring of transmitter input and output signals for up to six multiplexes, and up to two demodulators for advanced measurements on DVB-T2 signals.
DVB-T2 is the second generation of the DVB-T digital terrestrial standards deployed throughout Europe as well as all of Russia, India, Australia and most of Africa. It brings various improvements that between them can boost transmission capacity over a given infrastructure by up to 100 percent, compared with the first generation. It brings greater efficiency for single frequency operation by reducing the amount of bandwidth needed for the buffer, called the guard interval, to cope with multipath reflections during transmission. There is also scope for benefiting from signals received simultaneously from more than one transmitter in single frequency operation. The DVB has estimated that these measures together can increase capacity by 67 percent in single frequency mode.
The ability to carry more channels in a multiplex with DVB-T2 also increases the power of statistical multiplexing, because with a larger number it reduces the average headroom that has to be allowed for each channel to cope with peaks. Put simply, the more channels there are, the less likely they are all to peak at close to the same time, and this can be allowed for in the overall bandwidth budget. The result is a further capacity boost of about 20 percent.