The Future of Amateur Television

It is a fact nowadays that our spectrum becomes overloaded. ATV is a very popular transmission mode and the 23cm band is currently a typical example where a lot of users exist in a relative small frequency segment. Besides that we as amateurs all feel the need to transmit a signal that is as perfect as possible. We are already experiencing this with the extensive usage of digital audio transmission standards like NICAM or PCM. Wouldn't it be great if we can use a digital transmission standard for our video signals?

That is now possible. We have developed a digital television transmitter according to the DVB-S standard. DVB-S stands for Digital Video Broadcasting Satellite. There are several amateur websites at this moment which discuss the topic of digital amateur television but on most of them there is less technical background information available. Digital transmission techniques requires some severe technical background knowledge because digital modulated signals behave completely different in the transmission path with respect to the traditional wideband frequency modulation techniques. Lack of knowledge might lead to misuse of our scarce frequency space.

The introduction of digital modulation techniques for amateur use, specifically as an alternative for analog amateur television and the fact that just a few amateurs are able to develop a complete digital system, inspired us (pe1jok and pe1obw) to discover this new dimension. Our greed for knowledge leaded to the development of our own digital amateur television transmission system according to the DVB-S standard. At this moment we succeeded with our mission and we are proud to announce that we are the third independent group in Europe who finished the development of a working D-ATV system. Although our system is fully functional we are still working on extended possibilities of our DVB-S modulator with the main aim to stay ahead with all kind of technical issues. You can read these pages which might give you a bit more insight and maybe you'll find here some answers which you won't be able to find on other D-ATV websites.

Within these pages we want to give you more insight in the world of digital transmission. This will be done with a more or less theoretical description of the different modulation techniques and the inherent problems. We believe that some severe knowledge must be present among us when we all want to use digital video transmissions in the future. Furthermore we will discuss some of the different professional standards that currently exists for digital video broadcasting (DVB-S, DVB-C and DVB-T) and the possibility for using these standards for amateur purposes.