RF Shorts for July 10, 2014

By published

Europe's Megafon testing LTE Broadcast?
DigitalTVEurope.net reports Russia’s Megafon reportedly testing LTE Broadcast. “Russian mobile operator Megafon has reportedly begun testing LTE Broadcast technology from Huawei. According to local trade news site ComNews, Megafon is testing LTE Broadcast technology, centered on the eMBMS enhanced multicast standard, in Moscow using capacity in the 2.6GHz range.” The report said Megafon is testing the broadcast of multiplexed channels rather than individual streams.

DigitalTVEurope.net said late last year Huawei teamed with chipmaker Sequans Communications to conduct interoperability testing of Huawei LTE equipment with Sequans' eMBMS-capable chips in end-user devices.


Dutch Debate Future of Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT)

In an article on Advanced-Television.com titled "Dutch debate DTT future" it says the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs is holding a public consultation until the end of July on the future of free-to-air TV. Current DVB-T licenses in the country expire on Jan. 31, 2017. The government aims to decide what to do with the TV spectrum in early 2015.

“The government wants to offer clarity to the market well before the 15-year licenses expire, but noted there’s no decision yet on whether free-to-air TV is still needed. It could follow the international trend of devoting part of the UHF band, notably 700 MHz frequencies, to mobile broadband, reports Telecom Paper.”

The Advanced-Television article says that as a first step, the TV bands could be designated “co-primary” for broadcast and telecommunications in June 2015. Loss of the 700 MHz portion of the UHF band in the Netherlands would eliminate two of the five national layers for DVB-T, reducing the number of channels from 29 to 19.


Update to Last Week's Updated FCC TV Database Spreadsheet

Thanks to Mike Mahan for alerting me to a problem with the FCC TV database spreadsheet I posted at http://xmtr.com/fcc. I determined the problem was in the PERL script I use to filter the CDBS text databases – it was stripping out stations with a service type of “LD”. That's been fixed and an updated spreadsheet along with the fac_proc3.pl file used to generate the filtered text databases will be posted soon. The file dates on the corrected tv20140702.xls and tv20140702.zip files will be after Jul-08-2014.

Doug Lung
Doug Lung
Contributor

Doug Lung is one of America's foremost authorities on broadcast RF technology. As vice president of Broadcast Technology for NBCUniversal Local, H. Douglas Lung leads NBC and Telemundo-owned stations’ RF and transmission affairs, including microwave, radars, satellite uplinks, and FCC technical filings. Beginning his career in 1976 at KSCI in Los Angeles, Lung has nearly 50 years of experience in broadcast television engineering. Beginning in 1985, he led the engineering department for what was to become the Telemundo network and station group, assisting in the design, construction and installation of the company’s broadcast and cable facilities. Other projects include work on the launch of Hawaii’s first UHF TV station, the rollout and testing of the ATSC mobile-handheld standard, and software development related to the incentive auction TV spectrum repack. A longtime columnist for TV Technology, Doug is also a regular contributor to IEEE Broadcast Technology. He is the recipient of the 2023 NAB Television Engineering Award. He also received a Tech Leadership Award from TV Tech publisher Future plc in 2021 and is a member of the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society and the Society of Broadcast Engineers.