TeamCast's (left) Christophe Trolet, Head of Business Unit Solutions, and (right) Alain Untersee, Collaborative Projects Manager photographed with their TyGer V-HTS modulator.

Team Satnews is in full force at IBC... blisters and band aids are proof of the magnitude of this show. A stop along the way found the publisher, Silvano Payne, and Director of Marketing, Jill Durfee at the TeamCast booth. Here they chatted with Christophe Trolet, Head of Business Unit Solutions, and Alain Untersee, Collaborative Projects Manager.    

TeamCast, provider of digital modulation technologies for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), Wireless Transmission and Satellite Applications present five solutions at TeamCast’s booth #2B.51:

1. Viper's disruptive digital pre-correction technology 
2. TWISTER a high-end terrestrial digital exciter
3. DVB-CID solution
4. Arqiva selectes TWISTER exciter for solution to modernizing some of its transmitters
5. World's-first ATSC 3.0 SFN-STL solution

TeamCast, provider of digital modulation technologies for Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT), Wireless Transmission and Satellite Applications, is demonstrating digital pre-correction, a major feature for increasing the usable payload of a satellite transponder at IBC 2016.

VYPER

Digital pre-correction of the satellite’s signal chain is a major technical challenge. Although first generation solutions have been available on the market for a few years the end results are not as great as expected, especially for the low order constellations which are the most widely used: QPSK and 8PSK.

VYPER's range of satellite modulators and new and innovative digital pre-correction solutions were developed as the result of 20 years of experience.  This new technique of pre-correction for satellite applications offers significant gains in budget margin, from 1.5 dB for 8PSK to 5 dB for 32APSK, and is available as a simple software upgrade for the VYPER modulators.

Christophe Trolet, head of the Satellite Business Unit at TeamCast states, "This new solution by TeamCast is much more efficient than classical ones and will be usable with widely used constellations such as QPSK and 8PSK, while previous techniques are only efficient with high order constellations (e.g. 16APSK and 32APSK), which makes them of limited interest. Thanks to this new technology, our broadcast partners (especially DTH partners) could improve their bitrate by 10 percent without changing their set top boxes receivers. Again, we are bringing new opportunities to operators through these disruptive technologies available for our VYPER range.” 

TWISTER

2—TeamCast’s multi-standard TWISTER, a terrestrial digital TV exciter supports ISDB-T/TB and DTMB

Designed as a ready-to-use 1RU rack modulator/exciter to be integrated inside new and existing TV transmitters systems, TWISTER offers several key features to ease the integration within the transmitter design and to achieve top class of RF performances. This includes a state-of-the-art Digital Adaptive Pre-correction mechanism (GAP®), an Automatic Gain Control (AGC) process to ensure the correct output power stability and a monitoring of key transmitting power figures such as Forward Transmitted Power and Reflected Power levels. 

Originally designed for DVB-T and DVB-T2 markets, the product now supports ISDB-T/TB and DTMB standards. This addresses the needs for broadcasters in South-America, Philippines, China and Cambodia to upgrade and renew their existing transmitters. This also provides the opportunity for TX manufacturers who have already integrated TWISTER within their designs to enlarge their business footprint. 

Eric Pinson, Business Unit and Sales Manager at TeamCast says, “With TWISTER now supporting ISDB-T/TB and DTMB, 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 most of countries.” 

DVB-CID Receiver

3—TeamCast's DVB-CID solution to satellite interference problems

DVB-CID is a standardized key feature that assists satellite users and operators to quickly solve satellite interference problems. TeamCast has designed a complete solution (transmission and reception) that deals with this latest feature also called Carrier_Id. Satellite users can manage and prove that they are compliant with this new feature that is becoming mandatory by regulation.

TeamCast demonstrates first how its VYPER satellite modulator is adding the CID carrier to the transmitted carrier so that the resulting signal can be easily tracked and identified with proper receiving equipment. 

The demonstration also includes the use of TeamCast’s brand new CID receiver, which decodes the CID signal and allows operators to check and analyze carriers to ensure the DVB-CID signal is present and compliant with regulations.

Christophe Trolet, head of the Satellite Business Unit at TeamCast remarks, “Under the pressure of the regulators, the satellite transmission industry is looking for equipment (both transmission and reception) allowing to generate and check the CID. Our new CID Receiver is cost effective, easy to use (user-friendly GUI), and straightforward to integrate into any monitoring system (using SNMP) or, simply, as a stand-alone solution. It provides a real response to the industry’s expectations.” 

High-End Rack Exciter

4—Arqiva has selected its TWISTER exciter for modernizing some of its transmitters

TWISTER designed as an innovative solution for the TV exciter market, comes as a ready-to-use 1RU rack exciter specifically designed to be integrated inside new or existing TV transmitter systems. TWISTER brings several key features to ease the integration within the transmitter design and to achieve the topmost RF performances. Among these specific features embedded into TWISTER is the Automatic Gain Control (AGC). 

TWISTER’s AGC is used today in a wide variety of situations, having been integrated by several TX manufacturers within their designs, and with many different operational technologies (A/B Class and Doherty amplifiers, various power ranges, analogue TV, digital TV, etc.).  

One of the most successful, but challenging achievements, has been to adapt and to optimize the TWISTER’s AGC for a high-power inductive output tube (IOT) DVB-T2 transmitter (10 kW RMS) in the ARQIVA broadcast network in the UK. This IOT TX consists of two PA stages (the intermediate power amplifier (IPA) acting as a pre-amplifier, before the main IOT amplifying tube), both of which behave differently, especially during the warm-up sequence. 

Howard Holt, Principal Engineer at ARQIVA states, “Many tests and optimizations have been conducted onsite with TeamCast, evaluating different configurations with both RF and VDC probes. Dedicated configuration parameters have been very useful, such as FWP Loss Protection and Unmute protection. With TeamCast’s AGC, the transmitter could follow a smooth start-up sequence to full power and could recover from various trip simulations reliably and consistently.”