A T-DAB Field Trial Using a Low-Mast Infrastructure

A novel low-mast low-power Terrestrial Digital Audio Broadcasting (T-DAB) single frequency network topology is described and evaluated in this paper. For this purpose, a pilot network (band III and L-band) was constructed in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The performance of the band III pilot network (channel 12B) is compared with the existing traditional high-power high-mast T-DAB network (channel 12C) of the public service broadcaster. An important goal is to investigate whether the pilot network can co-exist with an existing traditional T-DAB network. The field trial shows that a gap filler can effectively neutralize the adjacent channel interference of the pilot network on the existing T-DAB network. Moreover, the L-band pilot network is compared with both band III networks by assessing the indoor coverage of every network. For estimation of the indoor coverage, 34 objects were investigated. Both the indoor penetration loss for band III and L-band was determined for each object. Indoor coverage in a region is reached if 95% of the buildings or more have indoor coverage. Using this definition, the loss for band III is 21.6 dB and for L-band 24.6 dB. As a result we consider the indoor penetration loss values reported in literature as too optimistic. Also other parameters of the pilot network were measured, such as the frequency re-use distance.