Laboratory Tests of ATSC M/H Commercial Receivers Performance on SFN Networks

The Single Frequency Networks (SFN) are widely used in Digital Television transmission networks due to the high spectral efficiency achieved by them. Digital modulation techniques with a cyclic prefix, like OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex) are adequate to define and use SFN networks due to their ability to deal with the artificial multipath produced in a SFN network. Nevertheless, the ATSC and ATSC M/H standards use the VSB-8 modulation technique, which has no cyclic prefix, so it is very sensitive to multipath. The ATSC standard has been recently implemented in Mexico, so the ATSC M/H standard can be used in the next years because it is compatible with ATSC, meanwhile ATSC 3.0, the newest standard of ATSC, it is not compatible. The performance of the reception with VSB-8 modulation depends strongly on the receiver channel equalizer. For this reason, the objective of this study is to analyze the performance of ATSC M/H commercial receivers in SFN networks. The results of this study will help in the implementation of SFN networks in Mexico and other countries that use ATSC.