Digital HDTV broadcasting over the CATV distribution system

Abstract

This contribution deals with the digital broadcasting of HDTV channels over the cable television (CATV) distribution system, using either single-carrier QAM or an orthogonal frequency division multiplex (OFDM) of many QAM carriers to represent an HDTV channel. Assuming that no error-correcting codes are used, we investigate two distinct cases: in the first case, a few HDTV channels are transmitted among many analog TV channels, whereas in the second case all transmitted channels are HDTV channels. We show that in the first case the transmit power of an HDTV channel can be substantially reduced (by about 10 dB or more) as compared to the transmit power of an analog TV channel, while still maintaining a satisfactory bit error rate (BER). In the second case, not only a considerable reduction of the total transmit power but also a reduction of amplifier cost and an increase of the number of TV channels can be achieved. Single-carrier QAM is found to perform slightly better (at most about 1 or 2 dB) than a multi-carrier QAM.