News & Updates 2011

The winners of the NAB2011 drawing of a DTU-215-GOLD and DTU-245-SY-SXP are known and have received their test and measurement devices.

Brian Holst of GuestTek is the lucky winner of the DTU-215-GOLD modulator. Brian is director of product management at GuesTek for the Free-to-Guest product. GuestTek is a Canadian Company that deploys and develops video distribution systems for hotel chains around the world.

Technologies involved include QAM modulation and 8VSB, DVB-T, ISDB-T reception. Brian is planning to use the DTU-215-GOLD modulator in the lab for simulating the various modulation standards and test the different types of receivers. The channel simulator that is included in the DTU-215-GOLD bundle is ideal to impair the RF signal and stress test their receivers.

Brian was very happy to win this product and said “it will be a great tool for my engineers back in Canada”

Thomas Zocolo of WKBN TV had luck on his side in Las Vegas this year and won the DTU-245-SY-SXP. Tom is the chief engineer at WKBN TV, FOX Youngstown, WYTV 33 and MY YTV in Youngstown, Ohio. He is responsible for maintaining all equipment from reception, encoding to transmission. Tom will use the DTU-245-SY-SXP with his laptop for troubleshooting incoming ASI feeds, encoders and multiplexers. Tom will also be able to look at the SDI uncompressed signal with SdEye software included in his DTU-245-SY-SXP. He was very happy to hear he won this product at NAB and said it will be very useful for his everyday job.

DekTec is continuously improving its award-winning Transport Stream monitoring solution, Xpect, resulting in the latest version 1.3.0. This release includes a lot of new features that have been requested by our customers.

The most noticeable change is a new window for service decoding in the web GUI, which enables a quick overall judgement of video and audio quality at the Xpect probe location. The bitrate at which video and audio is sent to the web GUI for remote viewing (via HTTP streaming) is configurable, to finetune IP network utilisation.
All commonly used encoding standards are supported, including MP2 Video, AVC Video, AC-3 Audio, AAC Audio, HE-AAC Audio, MP1 and MP2 Audio.

The 1.3.0 release also has support for indicating errors that have been resolved already. To distinguish between errors the corresponding web GUI indicator is colored orange. The operator can acknowledge one or all error(s) and revert the orange state back to the green state.

Further enhancements in the 1.3.0 release include:
- Clear event log function
- Extra elementary stream information in the web GUI, including frame rate and aspect ratio
- Show IP address in the web GUI header
- Improved error notifications

If you would like to evaluate Xpect, don't hesitate to contact your local distributor or our VP sales Nilesh Mandalia.

DekTec adds full multi-PLP support for DVB-C2 and DVB-T2 to its SDK. This enables our customers to write their own multi-PLP C2/T2 signal generators, gateways or automated test environments, without having to dive into the complexities of DVB-T2 or DVB-C2.

The DTAPI library provides easy access to the functions of DekTec devices through an object oriented interface. The DTAPI multi-PLP extensions add full support for the Physical Layer Pipe (PLP) concept as used in DVB’s second generation transmission standards DVB-T2 and DVB-C2.

The PLP concept allows the transmission of several independent logical data streams on a single RF channel. Each data stream is carried in an individual PLP. One or more PLPs can be arranged in a group of PLPs, typically containing one common PLP and multiple data PLPs. The common PLP carries the common SI data and each data PLP carries a partial Transport Stream containing one service.

The DTAPI multi-PLP extensions contain functions for transmitting data via individual PLPs, but also a Big-TS splitter function is provided. The Big-TS splitter performs all required PSI/SI processing to split a single Big TS into multiple data PLPs and a common PLP, as illustrated in the figure below.

The DTAPI multi-PLP extensions offer support for:
  - DVB-T2 Receiver Buffer Model validation;
  - DVB-T2 MISO simulation: Generation of both MISO transmitter signals with independent channel model;
  - T2-MI over ASI or over IP output;
  - Generation of test-point data through a call back function;
  - Peak Average Power Ratio (PAPR) reduction.

The DTAPI multi-PLP extensions introduce a new type of channel, the virtual channel. A virtual channel lets the DTAPI pass the modulated I/Q samples to a specified callback function, instead of writing them to a physical output. This enables custom processing of the multi-PLP modulator output, for example, writing the modulated I/Q samples to a file.