I spent this Sunday morning at the BCARES table showing off digital ATV transmitting from a backpack set. Live TV made a good draw to our table in the back of the room. Lots of folks came over to ask about BCARES as well as ATV and the equipment on display. I also had the DVB-T portable repeater as a static display (i.e., it wasn’t running).
I made a couple of tours around the swap meet recording as well as transmitting.
This Saturday 9/12 I and six other members of BCARES ran digital ATV cameras at this year’s first home football game at the University of Colorado. This marks our first all-digital ATV operation providing TV for situational awareness to the CU police department.
This operation was also our first use of the new HDMI-based quad box, allowing up to four digital ATV channels to be combined in high definition. The resulting output was streamed over an IP network from the press box to the command post located away from the stadium.
While the stadium has fixed cameras, our mobile cameras allow the CU security team to focus on areas around the stadium that are not well-covered as well as to get close-ups of incidents as they happen, particularly on the move. For BCARES, supporting CU football offers us a great training opportunity as well as a safe environment to prove out new technology.
The DVB-T transmitters were able to work with and without line-of-site to the antenna location on top of the press box using only 300 mW while sending a perfect 720p picture at nearly 6 Mbps.
Thanks to Mark KØLRS, Dave KIØHG, George KAØBSA, Pete WB2DVS, Tom KDØUOI, and Bill KDØYYY for all their hard work!
This past Saturday 8/29 I hosted an all-morning training session for BCARES members who are interested in digital ATV operations. The turnout was very good!
The first part of the training covered TV operations and the use of the video cameras and digital transmitters, particularly using ATV at CU football games. This part is comparable to the analog ATV training in prior years, but with changes brought about by the switch to digital.
In the second part, I covered some technical aspects of the European DVB-T system we use, specifically the transmission parameters we can set and how we decide what values to use to ensure we can get a picture through with low RF power and a noisy environment.
In addition to a static display including digital backpack transmitters and a portable repeater, I had live video running in the classroom, with pictures on a TV and signals displayed in a DVB-T test tool.
Thanks to all who showed up, and to Dave KIØHG and Mark KØLRS for bringing the new digital quad box and CU pack sets to display.
Handouts from the training are available in the ATV training section.
KØDVB-TV 