Timing-offset compensation techniques in ATSC DTV receivers

The paper presents symbol timing-offset compensation techniques to improve the reception performance of ATSC DTV receivers. Short and long echoes can induce timing-offset in the symbol timing recovery circuit. The timing-offset shifts sampling instants to the wrong points, causing the performance of the equalizer to become poor. When many echoes exist, the optimal sampling instant is the point at which the main-path has a peak value. By using channel estimation techniques, we find the optimal sampling instant, thereby compensating the timing offset and improving DTV reception performance.