DTV repeater emission mask analysis

Terrestrial digital television (DTV) requires careful planning in the allocation of RF channels, especially during the transition period when intermixing both analog and digital signals in the same coverage area. One important issue to consider is adjacent channel interference, which limits the number of RF channels utilized in any given area. This issue is important in the deployment of not only full service stations, but also of secondary stations such as translators, on-channel repeaters, and low power television stations. Full service stations have FCC rules that limit the amount of adjacent channel splatter by requiring the splatter energy to remain below a rigid emission mask. Currently there are no FCC rules for translators and low power television stations. The paper discusses typical DTV transmitter splatter sidebands and their causes, as well as specific methods for interference analysis from adjacent channel DTV splatter into adjacent NTSC or DTV signals. Two rigid emission masks ("simple" and "stringent") are proposed and evaluated. Several filter designs are computer simulated and analyzed for minimizing adjacent channel splatter interference as well as in-band DTV signal degradation. Linear pre-correction techniques are analyzed for various length (15-tap and 31-tap) transversal filter equalizers. The simulation is verified by measuring and evaluating DTV system performance for two hardware band-pass filters individually placed at the output of a low power (30 W average) transmitter.