To speed both ATSC fixed and ATSC mobile DTV deployments, Communications Research Center Canada, Moseley Broadcast and Rohde and Schwarz have teamed up to build one of North America's first single-frequency network test beds. The work will be conducted under the auspices of the CRC.
Covering about 250km (155mi) in the Ottawa, Ontario, area, the ATSC SFN test bed will supply a dedicated network using an available Ottawa TV channel. The network headend is located at CRC facilities, with one transmitter located on a communications tower at CRC and others on structures in and around Ottawa. A wireless WAN handles communications with remote labs and field measurement vehicles for equipment control and monitoring.
ATSC mobile SFN transmission equipment will be provided by Rohde and Schwarz, while Moseley Broadcast will supply the point-to-point microwave communication systems linking the headend to the SFN sites. The CRC, which designed the SFN topology for Ottawa, will provide the transmitter sites.
The CSC is also engaged in another aspect of mobile TV research: open systems. The center’s Mobile Multimedia Broadcasting (MMB) OpenMokast group just released a new version of its open-source software, a software stack that runs on DTV-enabled handsets with open operating systems — currently OpenMoko, Qtopia and Google's Android. You can download the group's software toolkit for multimedia broadcasting here.