On Sat, Oct 14, 2006 at 06:49:03AM -0700, Eric Blossom wrote:
The USRP could receive the raw signals for DVB-T in the 6 and 7 MHz wide
channel format. The 8 MHz wide version could be somewhat degraded
because of filter rolloff at the edges of the passband of the digital
downconverter in the FPGA. Shifting to 8-bit I&Q would allow the full
8 MHz wide signal to fit across the USB at the expense of dynamic range.
I'm not sure of the bandwidth required for DVB-S and thus can't comment.
DVB-S as used for video is usually upwards of 3 megasymbols/sec
as this kind of data rate is required to support sufficient transport
stream bandwidth for adequate distribution grade video. Many of the
actual signals on satellite, however, are multiplexes of multiple video
and audio streams sent at symbol rates as high as 26 to 29
megasymbols/sec.
Currently almost all signals are QPSK (NOT DQPSK, absolute phase
counts) although the standards permit 8PSK and even 16QAM. 8PSK IS used
for some HDTV feeds (notably the US broadcast networks ABC and NBC and
the Canadian network CBC) and some HDTV backhauls.
Roughly speaking, the actual rf bandwidth required to demodulate
QPSK is perhaps 1.1 to 1.2 times the symbol rate with a higher sampling
rate than that probably necessary to get good results.
This implies that the USRP with a 6 to 8 mhz bandwidth might be
able to successfully demodulate the SCPC DVB-S QPSK video transmissions
at symbol rates like 3.9876 megasymbols/sec (5.5 mbs transport stream at
FEC 3/4) commonly used by satellite trucks for news feeds. Most of
these signals carrying single channel NTSC video (720 by 480 MPEG 2) run
at either 3.9 megasymbols/sec or 4.2 megasymbols/sec.