This practical reference book is concerned mainly with the technology of digital terrestrial television broadcasting. The author describes the latest developments in digital television, the status of analog technology, and the basics of digital technology and its specifications. The operating and measurement procedure is given especially extensive treatment. Technical future scenarios are also discussed. The book thus gives a self-contained account of this topical theme which will be useful for trainee engineers as well as media experts and broadcasting professionals.

In the past decades, traditional television broadcasting has been an autonomous field which was largely independent of the world of telecommunications and computers. The analog television standards PAL, SECAM and NTSC have remained almost untouched with regard to their picture information. Whatever development took place was essentially in support of programming and was based on the existence of a certain redundancy in the representation of the signal in the time and fre quency domain. In the 70S, for example, the teletext system was introduced throughout Europe. A further supplementary...