Mobile reception of the terrestrial DVB-system

The European standard for the terrestrial digital video broadcasting, DVB-T, is primarily designated to the stationary and portable reception of video services. In most European countries this standard is already introduced or will be introduced very soon. Because of the increasing demand for mobile reception and the migration of communication and broadcasting, e.g. in the area of multimedia communications, it is of importance for the network operator to analyze the capabilities, but also the limitations of the available DVB-T-system operated in a mobile environment. In this paper we will show by means of measurements and hardware simulations that mobile reception of the DVB-T-system is possible for certain sets of parameters. It turns out that mobile reception in single frequency networks is possible for moderate vehicle speeds if robust modulation schemes like QPSK and 16-QAM together with high FEC protection ratios, e.g. code rate 1/2 and 2/3 are chosen. We found out that in general the maximum speed in single frequency networks (SFN) is lower than in multi-frequency networks (MFN) for the same set of parameters.