QAM RF and MPEG Video Monitoring, Analysis, and Troubleshooting Tool

Cricket^® QAM Plus is a powerful QAM video quality and service assurance troubleshooting tool for Cable System operators that need to monitor, analyze, debug, and resolve video quality issues at the network edge. It is designed for use in remote monitoring and troubleshooting applications of the QAM at the headend, in the hub sites or at the subscriber premises. Cricket QAM Plus is perfect for monitoring each service group within an RF network. With the Cricket QAM Plus offering two tuners, the probe provides more monitoring coverage and continuous scanning of the QAM channels quickly alerting operators to RF outages and MPEG issues. Integrating iVMS^® correlates information from all IneoQuest probes in the network with all ongoing measurements that Cricket QAM Plus is logging, and notifies the network operations center (NOC) of any problems. Alerted to a specific video fault at a specific service group, the service provider can be proactive in correcting the situation, potentially leading to reduced call center traffic volume.

The Cricket QAM Plus not only is a remote monitoring probe, but it can be utilized as an inexpensive, portable QAM RF Analyzer providing constellation diagrams, MER, BER, and Reed-Solomon metrics, and power levels.

Cricket QAM Plus features an RF interface for monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting of MPEG video flows, SPTS or MPTS, inside a QAM. In addition, Cricket QAM Plus provides useful RF metrics to enable analysis and monitoring of the RF signal. The 10/100Mb Fast Ethernet connection allows a communication path to IQMediaAnalyzer Pro^®, the web configuration interface and the iVMS video management system for seamless monitoring of digital video network health from headend to home. Combined with the iVMS and the rest of the IneoQuest portfolio, Cricket QAM Plus provides the most advanced digital video quality and service assurance solution available.

Applications

• Analyze and troubleshoot QAM RF signal
• Monitor and analyze RF and MPEG video quality issues in real-time
• Service group monitoring

Key Features

• Remote monitoring of up to two QAM RF channels / MPEG transport streams simultaneously
• Modulation support:
• Annex A 8MHz - EN 300 429
• Annex B & C version available
• QAM 64 & 256
• Upstream channel duplexer
• RF tuner
• Supports frequencies up to 1 GHz
• Up to two tuners on a single F connector
• Dual SAW filters
• Solid state tuner (no air coils)
• Configurable Frequency scanning
• RF Measurements and Analysis
• Tuner signal loss
• Carrier level
• MER and EVM
• Pre FEC BER and RS correctable count
• Post RS uncorrectable count
• Constellation diagrams
• Carrier offset (in Hz)
• Symbol rate offset (in ppm)
• MPEG Measurements and Analysis
• Supports SD / HD MPEG over SPTS and MPTS
• RF & MPEG analysis to the PID level
• Flexible alarm template configuration
• Error detection according to TR 101 290
• Transport stream & program metrics including CC loss, PID bitrates, Outages, and more
• 80 MB triggered TS capture buffer
• Integrates with iVMS video management system for program correlation through entire network