Rapid prototyping of a test modem for terrestrial broadcasting of digital television

This paper introduces rapid prototyping of a complex system and the difficulties that appear when a real-time prototype of such a system is approached. These concepts are applied to the construction of a test modem for terrestrial broadcasting of digital television, in which orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is the transmission technique. The possibility of reducing the number of sub-carriers in the OFDM signal and obtaining enough information about the system performance in hostile environments (multipath, phase noise, non-linear, ...) is considered and discarded. As a conclusion, a non-real time prototype is presented which allows one to optimize parameters, verify the possibility of implementation and evaluate subjective qualities.