8-VSB Video Broadcast Monitoring and Troubleshooting Tool

Cricket^® 8-VSB is a powerful and cost-effective video quality and service assurance tool for broadcasters needing to audit, monitor, analyze and troubleshoot their 8-VSB digital terrestrial service. The Cricket 8-VSB has a unique ability to monitor and report on the physical layer characteristics, such as Reed-Solomon errors, while simultaneously reporting on the MPEG-2 transport stream layer. This allows the Broadcasters to easily isolate any transmission problems from encoder or multiplexer. The Cricket 8-VSB can be deployed at the transmission site and at the corresponding receiver sites to perform service auditing, monitoring and analysis.

The Cricket 8-VSB contains a single RF Tuner which can be configured to continuously scan a sequence of RF channels or tune to a specific frequency to monitor and report on any customer affecting problems; such as loss events, outage, bit-rate variation, PCR clock variation, and TR 101 290 errors. The Cricket also provides physical layer monitoring for errors such as Reed-Solomon corrected and uncorrected errors. By default, it will scan the North American standard terrestrial frequency range of 53 MHz to 857MHz. Custom configured frequency maps are also supported within the Cricket 8-VSB.

Cricket 8-VSB features a single RF tuner with coax interface for monitoring and analysis of video transport streams, SPTS or MPTS, inside the 8-VSB signal. Using an external 8-VSB antenna, signals can be taken directly off-air for your monitoring and testing. In addition, Cricket 8-VSB provides useful RF metrics enabling physical layer monitoring.

Applications

• Confidence monitoring of 8-VSB broadcast signal
• Verification and troubleshooting of studio to transmitter link and RF coverage area
• Cost effective solution for 24/7 unattended off air monitoring

Key Features

• Reports signal-to-noise ratio and Reed-Solomon errors, corrected and uncorrected
• Real-time monitoring and measurements of video programs
• Auto scan and discovery of VSB RF frequencies
• Tunes to any UHF/VHF channel
• Monitoring and analysis to the PID level
• Remote video verification with IQtv^™
• Supports SD and HD video content over SPTS and MPTS
• Video trigger/capture
• Seamless integration into iVMS^®
• Customizable RF Frequency maps and alarm thresholds
• USB connector for local management with PC
• 10/100 MB Fast Ethernet management interface
• Field upgradeable

The 10/100 Fast Ethernet connection allows for management via several of IneoQuest's software applications: iVMS Video Management System, IQMediaAnalyzer Pro^®, and HTML interface. Combined with the iVMS, Cricket 8-VSB, in addition to the rest of the IneoQuest hardware portfolio, provides the most advanced digital video broadcast quality and service assurance solution available.