Enhanced 8-VSB transmission for North-American HDTV terrestrial broadcast

We present a new robust backward compatible 8-VSB transmission system for HDTV terrestrial broadcast. The new transmission system allows better reception of signals for portable, mobile and indoor receivers. In the proposed system a scalable fraction of the main service is used to transmit robustly encoded data. The robust service has at least a 6 dB fade margin advantage over the main service. In addition, the data allocated to the robust stream can also be used at the receiver to improve the reception of the normal stream. The robust data is utilized by the normal stream receiver as randomly distributed training symbols which can be used in the equalizer to improve the receiver performance for dynamic multipath channels.