Home >> News: June 1st, 2015 >> Story
Satnews Daily
June 1st, 2015

TeamCast Bringing A Whole Slew Of Debuts To CommunicAsia2015


[SatNews] TeamCast will unveil several new products at CommunicAsia2015, including new firmware that features the ISDB-T/TBstandard on TWISTER, in addition to the DVB-T and DVB-T2 standards.

The TWISTER rack exciter has been designed as an innovative solution for the TV exciter market, bringing several key features to ease integration within the transmitter design and to achieve top of the class RF performance. These features include a state-of-the-art Digital Adaptive Pre-correction mechanism, an Automatic Gain Control (AGC) process to ensure the correct output power stability, and the monitoring of key transmitting power figures such as Forward Transmitted Power and Reflected Power levels. TWISTER also integrates all the mechanisms required to feed transmitter sites with ASI and/or IP streams in highly secured formats, as well as a full control via a WEB GUI and SNMP.

“With TWISTER now supporting ISDB-T/TB, we continue our strategy to provide all markets with very reliable and cost-effective digital exciters, bringing constantly improving performance. The cutting-edge digital adaptive pre-correction algorithm implemented into TWISTER, aims at reaching significant gain in terms of transmitter power efficiency, thus reducing utility expenses that contributes in reducing recurrent OPEX costs for Broadcasters in ISDB-T countries,” said Eric Pinson, Business Unit Manager at TeamCast. The ISDB-T TWISTER will be demonstrated on TeamCast’s stand #1U4-10.

TeamCast has also announced VORTEX, a new stand-alone Terrestrial TV exciter supporting ATSC 1.0 and ready for ATSC 3.0. VORTEX comes as a ready-to-use stand-alone rack modulator/exciter, specifically designed to be integrated inside new and existing TV transmitter systems. VORTEX integrates TeamCast’s third generation ATSC 1.0 modulation core. VORTEX also provides a clear upgrade path to ATSC 3.0 (when approved) by enabling a simple field installed software license. This unique TeamCast solution eliminates the need for additional Exciter purchases when ATSC 3.0 is approved, enabling Broadcaster’s to reuse and recycle their existing TeamCast Exciter systems, reducing CAPEX costs. VORTEX comes as a very innovative solution for the TV exciter market, bringing several key features to ease the integration within transmitter design and to achieve high level RF performance. This includes state-of-the-art Digital Adaptive Pre-correction, an Automatic Gain Control (AGC) process to ensure the correct output power stability and monitoring of key transmitting power measurements such as Forward Transmitted Power and Reflected Power levels.

With this new product, TeamCast is sharing its experience in designing and operating 2nd Generation of Terrestrial Standards. After the success of its DVB-T2 product range worldwide, VORTEX will play a key role in countries where the ATSC 1.0 has been deployed and where ATSC 3.0 is foreseen. Being an active member of the ATSC forum and historic member of DVB, TeamCast has leveraged its experience in the integration of DVB-T2 technologies in the development of the ATSC 3.0 VORTEX modulator.
VORTEX includes all functions required by the Broadcasters as particularly the remote control via WEB interface, the management via SNMP and the capability to support hot-standby 1+1 redundancy.

“We believe that VORTEX allows TV Broadcasters to invest in a longer term and future-proof transmitter Exciter solution, in a context of major transitions foreseen for the terrestrial Broadcast environment such as the introduction of the new ATSC 3.0 standard and the TV spectrum repacking plan,” said Eric Pinson, Head of the Technology Business Unit at TeamCast.

TeamCast is also debuting at CommunicAsia 2015 a new S110 software version that enables the EDI input on Green4DAB, TeamCast’s high-end OEM Digital Radio modulator dedicated to DAB/DAB+/DMB networks. Green4DAB is as a very compact and reliable OEM digital modulator, ready to be integrated within VHF Digital Transmitter designs. Enabling the EDI input brings the capability to use IP inputs to receive the front-end contributions. This will come as a simple software upgrade. Green4DAB also features dual-stream ETI input processing, an onboard satellite demodulator, as well as a built-in GPS receiver.

“With the EDI input, we complete the Green4DAB development to help our customers to provide full-featured DAB/DAB+/DMB transmitters. We truly believe that using IP networks to distribute signals to transmitters will strongly help the network providers to save CAPEX and OPEX costs compared to traditional distribution networks. With addition to the cutting-edge digital adaptive precorrection algorithm implemented intoGreen4DAB, these costs will significantly decrease, as a consequence of a much better transmitter efficiency,”, said Eric Pinson, Head of the Technology Business Unit at TeamCast. “With this new release, Green4DAB can handle unicast or multicast streams with full seamless switching between EDI and ETI inputs and with error correction capacity. As an unmatched feature, it supports the absolute timestamps required for particular SFN network configurations, in addition to relative timestamps. Besides the Digital Radio applications, this new Green4DAB version can also be used as a DVB-T/T2compliant Digital TV modulator for the VHF band, with IP inputs” adds Eric. The new version of Green4DAB will be demonstrated on TeamCast’s stand #1U4-10.