Coverage aspects of digital terrestrial audio and television broadcasting

For terrestrial broadcast services the reception situation at the border of the coverage area on principle is a problem which affects different coverage aspects. it is reasonable to have a graceful degradation for mobile reception of digital audio services at the edge of the coverage area, but for stationary reception it is only interesting whether a digital service can be received ''error-free'' or ''not at all''. Furthermore, there is a big difference in the reception probability between portable receivers and receivers with directional roof-top antennas. This implies difficulties for the definition of a coverage area. The present contribution deals with coverage aspects of digital terrestrial audio and television broadcasting in general. Especially, it emphasises the possibility of the new specification for digital terrestrial video broadcasting (DVB-T) to increase the coverage probability for portable reception on the base of a hierarchical modulation. The coverage probability is determined for a regular single frequency network (SFN) on the basis of 'Monte Carlo simulations.