Testing ISDB-Tb digital TV receivers

Abstract

The introduction of digital TV in Uruguay, adhering to the ISDB-T standard as many South American countries, is beginning: channels were assigned and the decoders and receivers are being imported, because the Uruguayan market size is not sufficient to manufacture them locally. The government decided to test the receivers for compliance with the standards, and this task was committed to Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de la República (UdelaR) and Centro de Ensayos de Software (CES). This article reports the key aspects of this work: the analysis of the standards, the definition of a type approval protocol, and concludes with an overview on the existing agreements in the ISDB-T community. Currently, the protocol is well defined for signal reception (sensitivity, modulation modes, decoding, video and audio formats). In contrast, the existing implementations are not compatible regarding interactivity, and therefore a set of universal tests would be very restricted. In fact, in this work a common set of commands was searched, but the conclusion is that it would be too scarce to implement useful or appealing applications. The evolution and unification of the standard is an important task to perform. Local companies (software and audio visual branches), broadcasters and local academies need to follow actively this evolution and contribute to it.