Smart Antenna-Aided Indoor Reception of Digital Terrestrial TV: Test & Development Platform

This paper provides a comprehensive reporting of an independent investigation carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of smart antenna performance for indoor reception of digital terrestrial TV (DTV) signals. To be able to do this, we have made use of a CEA-909 compliant smart antenna. The CEA-909 standard was created in North America to enhance indoor reception of 1st generation of ATSC signals (ATSC1.0). The smart antenna was adopted inside a test and development platform to measure the performance gain when receiving DVB-T and ISDB-T broadcast signals inside two different indoor environments; office and domestic premises. We report on the enhanced scanning and tracking algorithms developed during the course of this activity as well as documenting a new decision metric. This new metric, Quality Factor, provides a very simple and yet efficient measurement of multi-path present in an indoor environment before and after the smart antenna is optimally configured. In a typical test case, improvement gains of up to 16 dB were recorded.