Blind decision feedback equalization for terrestrial television receivers

In December 1996 the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) adopted the Grand Alliance (GA) system as the digital television broadcasting standard for the United States ending a seven-year-long search for a fully digital television standard. MPEG-2 was chosen as the video compression standard, and trellis-coded 8-vestigial sideband (VSB) with a training sequence was chosen as the transmission standard. The laboratory tests that were performed on the final two competing systems, 8-VSB with training sequence and 32-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) with blind equalization, showed a need for blind equalization in dynamic channels that could not be adequately handled by an equalizer training on the training sequence alone. Hence, the final GA system recommended the use of blind equalization in the receiver. In this paper, we describe the U.S. digital television transmission standard as it pertains to the equalization problem, typical transmission channel characteristics and the need for blind equalization in terrestrial television receivers.