Satellite test results of 30 Mbits/s digital TV transmission

This paper reviews the growth of the Intelsat TV traffic and points out the future need of adopting more efficient transmission methods such as digital transmission methods. Then some field test results of a digital color TV transmission are presented which was performed through the Intelsat-IV satellite using a recently developed 30 Mbits/s codec. For the received digital pictures, two kinds of subjective evaluations were carried out; one was a comparative evaluation between the original picture and the received picture by the digital transmission, and the other was between pictures of digital transmission and of FM transmission. The results indicated that the picture quality of the 30 Mbit/s digital transmission is slightly better than that available with the current half-transponder FM transmission.