So television became digital
Digital television broadcasting has been the dream of broadcast engineers for many years. Comparatively to the current analogue television services provided, digital broadcasting has the potential to provide higher quality and definition for an extended range of services, with applications not presently available. The EC funded "Verification and Launch of Integrated Digital Advanced Television in Europe" project, or briefly, VALIDATE, resulted in key breakthrough achievements that allowed its successful realisation. More specifically, the VALIDATE consortium agreed on a digital terrestrial television broadcasting standard, namely the DVB-T specification and set up many experimental networks in many European countries for its detailed verification. The verification process involved extensive laboratory tests and field trials, which revealed the key areas of the non-compliant modem technology that led to the development of new or the modification of existing modems. In addition, in verifying the specifications, the parameters that are necessary for service planning, such as failure points, susceptibility to interference and interference caused from analogue television broadcasting stations were successfully identified. Special attention was also paid to the management and transmission of signals, such as transmitter specifications. The VALIDATE project demonstrated the feasibility of digital terrestrial broadcasting whose enhanced capabilities significantly affected the television and media society later on. Thus, the DVB-T system is currently used in many European countries, as well as Australia and Singapore and its key findings have been adopted by the industry of manufacturing TV receivers. It is expected that the work performed will be further investigated for providing high tech mobile applications.
