DVB-T2 and HDTV Second Generation Digital Terrestrial TV Broadcasting

Governments everywhere are moving towards Analogue Switch Off in TV broadcasting. Digital Video Broadcasting standards for use terrestrially as well as over satellite and cable have been available for many years, but viewers and users often see limited benefits in migration. With recent changes in television formats, demands for high definition TV services have increased. These already exist for delivery over DVB-S and over cable but are not easy to achieve over DVB-T. Delivering new HDTV services and migrating from analogue to digital together can offer attractive possibilities to governments and the industry alike.

DVB-T2 provides new opportunities to increase performance of DVB-T services and with changes in channel coding and encoding compression, deliver HDTV services without increases in radio bandwidth. Already services are planned for implementation in 2009 in the UK and extensive interest is seen around the world in HDTV. To succeed new services will need to migrate encoding of video streams, change multiplexing techniques and implement new mechanisms in the radio layer to deliver better forward error recovery and more digital bandwidth.

This course provides a fast overview of how DVB-T current is deployed; HDTV services are encoded and delivered currently. It will then provide a detailed understanding of the frame structure, channel coding and modulation for a second generation digital terrestrial television broadcasting system that will be used by DVB-T2.