SECTION MEETING REPORT

Meeting Date:

September 9, 1997

Attendance:

22

Location:

Sandy Corporation

Troy, Michigan

Speaker:

Andrew Larsen

Microwave Radio Corporation

Subject:

Current Issues in Digital Microwave STL

Section Chair Gene Wilczak began by introducing the newly-elected managers and the rest of the section officers.

Central Region Governor Harold Miller gave an update from the Governors' meeting, including a report on the new Society logo, increase in membership dues, changes to the publication schedule and editorial policy of the Journal, Society insurance plans for members, and the Convention.

The evening's speaker, Andrew Larsen of Microwave Radio Corporation, discussed various alternative approaches to providing terrestrial digital microwave video service for the studio-to-transmitter link. He covered data rates and coding schemes and how the current STL channels accomodate them, and the cost and technical considerations of carrying various combinations of NTSC and ATV signals. He showed diagrams of transmitter and receiver systems for handling various types of signals and explained RF considerations, including link gain budgets and performance of antennas and transmission lines. Means of increasing existing system performance were discussed, as well as diversity techniques for increasing link reliability.

Mr. Larsen briefly covered approaches to feeding digital signals for ENG purposes. Not as much research and development has been done into ENG applications, but it appears that current channels can accomodate existing NTSC equipment. As digital cameras with their own data rates come into use, microwave equipment will have to be designed with format-specific modem designs to handle their data streams. He said that as compression and coding schemes improve, it would be possible to handle multiple video feeds from a truck by multiplexing over a single RF channel.

Questions from the audience followed.

Submitted by:

Frank Maynard, WKBD-TV Secretary/Treasurer, SMPTE Detroit Section 248-355-7129 maynard@oeonline.com