The impact of CSO/CTB distortion on BER characteristics by hybrid multichannel analog/QAM transmission systems

This article describes the measurements of composite second order (CSO), composite triple beats (CTB) frequency spectrum and time-varying distortion in the basic bandwidth (BB) (0-4 MHz) of the 64-QAM digital channels by multichannel AM/64-QAM optical and coaxial transmission systems. For any regular standard frequency plans (Europe, USA, NCTA, etc.) there is, for the I and Q components in the BB of the QAM channels, the harmonic series of the CSO/CTB with the first harmonic f/sub 1/. It has been shown that for all the same laser-optics or coaxial transmission systems the CSO/CTB distortions spectrum form in the QAM BB 60-80 /spl mu/s duration bursts of a series pulse with a pulse period T=1/f/sub 1/ and a pulse duration /spl tau//spl ap/0.4/f/sub m/, where f/sub m/ is the CSO/CTB harmonic with maximum amplitude in the QAM BB. The bursts result in the essential unevenness of error bits in time domain distribution. These bursts can deteriorate essential error correction by the interleaver-deinterleaver and Reed-Solomon (RS) forward error correction (FEC) code of the transmission systems also with a relative low bit error rate (BER) of about 10/sup -5/ before FEC. There is, white Gaussian noise like, intermodulation distortion from interaction of digital-, digital-analog channels too, that have added white Gaussian noise.