Canal 13, in Santiago, Chile, is broadcasting and testing the Japanese, European and North American DTV standards. This is at the request of the Undersecretary's Office of Telecommunications to help decide which standard to adopt in Chile.
The station has the antennas and equipment to simultaneously broadcast American (ATSC), Japanese (ISDB-T) and European (DVB-T) standards from the Hill San Cristóbal. ATSC is transmitted on channel 12, ISBN-T on channel 24 and DVB-T on channel 27.
Roberto Plass, manager of engineering at Canal 13, is in charge of these emissions and favors the quality of the ATSC and ISDB-T signals over DVB-T. Part of this is due to the DVB-T 50Hz refresh rate that must be converted to 60Hz for reception on existing receivers. Regardless of this conversion, however, Plass still feels that the DVB-T standard contains visible motion artifacts.
A surprise in these transmissions has been the robustness of the Japanese standard, transmitting at 250W, without multipath problems. ISDB-T can be received directly by cellular telephones. The Japanese system delivers data in addition to DTV programming. News, weather forecasts and highway traffic conditions can be displayed. In addition, the system includes emergency earthquake alerts that displays of a map with the epicenter and the magnitudes in the nearest cities.
ATSC is transmitted at more than 1000W, and can be received by most of the 30,000 HDTVs already sold in Chile. These receivers support both NTSC analog and ATSC digital transmissions.
