Here’s a short summary of this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas: Fewer people, smaller booths and not much new on the RF and transmission side. However, there was a lot of excitement around the launch of TV 3.0 in Brazil, with some products designed specifically for that market. In addition, there was an obvious urgency to complete the transition to ATSC 3.0.
In addition to the lack of a defined date for the end of ATSC 1.0, the major impediment to an ATSC 3.0 switch is a lack of viewers, due to a relatively small number of compatible TV sets and limited low-cost options for receiving ATSC 3.0 on existing devices.
A quick search on walmart.com revealed pages of TV sets, including a “55-inch class” Hisense model for under $200. None show ATSC 3.0/NextGen TV capability. A search for “nextgen” gave no broadcast-related results, but a search on “ATSC 3.0” did list the HDHomerun Flex and the ADTH dongle. Set-top boxes or dongles are an option, but reviews indicate that viewers find them complicated to use if they require a separate remote control.
Reception Progress
The good news from the ATSC exhibit this year was that the low-cost dongle ($70) from ADTH, along with other low-cost devices, supports reception of stations with content protection and also enables broadcast applications.
When combined with a compatible streaming box, like the Onn. 4K Pro, the ADTH dongle allows a viewer to move between NextGen TV and streaming content with the same remote. I bought one and so far, I have been happy with it.
The dongle’s off-air reception of ATSC 3.0 signals via its Saankhya Labs chipset was better than that of my Airwavz Redzone receiver with the original LG chipset, and even better than my GTMedia HDTVMate ATSC 3.0 dongle with the Sony chipset.
I was able to get perfect reception of ATSC 3.0 stations, including protected content, in Honolulu, Reno, Nev., and Los Angeles with just a whip antenna. The other dongles had problems with KCOP’s Channel 13 signal in Los Angeles, even with a better antenna.
One problem that likely applies to any device that doesn’t provide an HDMI output is that the device it is connected to must support AC-4 audio, HEVC video and Widevine Level 1 content protection (DRM). It worked great on my Samsung S24, but not on my recent Lenovo M11 tablet (which has Dolby Atmos and Widevine L1, but not AC-4). This requirement also rules out compatibility with any Apple device.
This problem has been recognized and work is underway to support multiple digital rights management (DRM) formats, like Apple’s FairPlay Streaming, as well as to provide options for devices that do not support AC-4 audio. Ideally, this can be accomplished with firmware updates instead of hardware replacement.
Transmission Requirements
While Brazil’s TV 3.0 is based on ATSC 3.0, there are some major differences in transmitter and antenna requirements. TV 3.0 uses MIMO, which splits the signal into horizontally polarized and vertically polarized components, increasing capacity. It requires a dual-polarized antenna with dual feed lines, two individual high-power amplifiers, and a modified exciter. Both Rohde & Schwarz and GatesAir had TV 3.0 transmitters available and Dielectric was showing antennas for TV 3.0.
Another major difference in TV 3.0 compared to U.S. broadcasting is Brazil has opened up new spectrum around 300 MHz for TV, which requires unique antennas. Dielectric was exhibiting its designs on the show floor. Due to the dual polarization, each transmitter will require two mask filters in addition to two HPAs, including new designs for the 300 MHz channels.
While my focus is on RF, Brazil’s TV 3.0 not only requires new antennas, transmitters and exciters, but new baseband gear. Enensys Technologies showed a complete baseband solution, from encoder output through the exciter. Triveni also showed support for TV 3.0 in its Streamscope analyzer and Guidebuilder scheduler/gateway product line.
New Gear at NAB Show
Back in the U.S., D2D was showing new firmware/software for its advanced Flex video gateway. Flex can convert an ATSC 1.0 transport stream into an ATSC 3.0 STL-TP output. The device handles transcoding, scheduler and gateway functions, providing a low-cost (under $10,000) way for an LPTV or translator operator to transmit ATSC 3.0. D2D is also working on a box to receive an ATSC 3.0 signal and retransmit it as ATSC 1.0.
This is more complicated, given that ATSC 3.0’s HEVC compression and modulation provides much greater capacity than ATSC 1.0 and MPEG-2. This will likely require either reducing the resolution of the ATSC 3.0 stream when converting HEVC to MPEG-2 or dropping some program streams.
Avateq showed a line of products to support the ATSC 3.0 Broadcast Positioning Service (BPS). (I’ll have more on BPS in part two of my NAB Show review, which will look at the Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference sessions). It is difficult to conduct mobile reception studies with ATSC 1.0 due to Doppler and multipath preventing receiver sync.
That isn’t a problem for many ATSC 3.0 configurations, and Avateq showed software that took signal data from the Avateq AVQ-200 receiver and combined it with GPS data to plot signal strength on a map. I had some suggestions on how to improve the map display, which should appear in an update.
Anywave Broadcast was hoping to show its new liquid-cooled, low-to-medium power transmitter at NAB Show, but it didn’t arrive in time. Looking at photos, the design is interesting in that it doesn’t use an outdoor heat exchanger but one incorporated into the transmitter rack. Anywave said liquid cooling is better than air in removing heat from amplifiers.
Even with the liquid-to-air exchanger, fan and pump, the new transmitter is more energy-efficient and much quieter than force-air-only cooling. Anywave also showed its exciter line, which supports both ATSC 1.0 and 3.0. It can be configured as an ATSC 3.0 translator, using either an ATSC 3.0 or ATSC 1.0 input signal.
TRedess updated me on its exciter and transmitter, which are capable of simultaneously transmitting ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast signals in a manner compliant with ATSC 3.0 standards. Castanet also showed ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast in the ATSC booth (see story, page 17). The system uses time-division multiplexing and ATSC 3.0’s bootstrap to identify segments with ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast content.
The demonstration used all but 10% of the channel capacity for 5G Broadcast. TRedess showed me an application that calculated data capacity and bandwidth for different ratios of ATSC 3.0 and 5G Broadcast time.
As I’ve written before, I have not seen any 5G Broadcast phones, dongles or receivers for sale to the public in the U.S. As with ATSC 3.0, the success of 5G Broadcast in the U.S. will depend on the availability and cost of receivers.
The flexibility of the ATSC 3.0 standard, which allows for interleaving with other standards like 3GPP, presents new possibilities for broadcasters. In my next column, I’ll review sessions covering these opportunities and what broadcasters will have to do to take advantage of them. I’ll also have a short report on the National Translator Association (NTA) conference in Reno.
As always, comments and questions are welcome. Email me at dlung@transmitter.com.
