60 GHz band 64 QAM/OFDM terrestrial digital broadcasting signal transmission by using millimeter-wave self-heterodyne system

This paper describes the first time experimental studies on 60-GHz band transmissions of terrestrial digital broadcasting signals (ISDB-T) with 64-QAM modulations on coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (COFDM) format. It has been a very difficult experiment to accomplish because it requires very stable and low phase-noise oscillators in the millimeter-wave band. The use of our proposed millimeter-wave self-heterodyne system, overcame this problem without using a stable oscillator, and provided a bit error rate (BER) of less than 10/sup -6/ without any forward error correction. We also discuss the relationship between the carrier-to-noise power ratio and the BER obtained, and demonstrate that the penalty of the required CNR for our experimental system is less than 1 dB compared to the results of a back-to-back BER test.