Crown Castle Purchases Thales DVB-H Transmitter Systems

Crown Castle Mobile Media will use Thales Affinity transmitters for its initial DVB-H deployments. Many broadcasters are familiar with the 1,000-watt output Affinity transmitters used for UHF ATSC DTV, but may not be aware the Affinity is also available for use at L-band and S-band with a wide range of modulation types, including DVB-T and DVB-H.

"We feel privileged to work with Crown Castle on their roll-out of the DVB-H Mobile TV network," said Richard Fiore Jr., senior vice president, sales and marketing at Thales Broadcast and Multimedia.

"We initially shipped demo units of our L-Band Affinity product in January 2004 to Crown Castle for their Pittsburgh trial. We are pleased with the initial success and experience gained and with the evolution of the relationship between our two companies. We look forward to this next stage of the project and completing our work successfully for Crown Castle," he said.

Thales previously announced it had entered into a co-development program with QUALCOMM to create an exciter for QUALCOMM's FLO modulation technology. That announcement said the FLO transmitter would use Thales' ULTIMATE (higher power) DTV transmitter platform.

At this time, DVB-H and QUALCOMM's FLO modulation are the two most mentioned modulation formats for TV-to-cell phone use in the United States.