TABLE OF CONTENTS Kunitoshi Nishikawa
Hideo Iizuka
Kyohei Fujimoto
Japanese digital television services and the demonstration of the mobile reception in Tokyo area are presented in this chapter. Then, automobile antennas for digital television reception are presented. The antennas were designed for such parameters as limited installation spaces, omnidirectional radiation pattern, and so on, and include not only prototype antennas but also antennas on the market.
Digital television (TV) services have been available in Europe and North America since September 1998. In Japan, the services were started in three large cities, Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, in December 2003, and are spreading over a large area. Frequency bandwidth is assigned from 470 to 710 MHz, and horizontal polarization is utilized. The Japanese terrestrial digital broadcasting protocol is designated as Integrated Service Digital Broadcasting-Terrestrial (ISDB-T), and Band Segmented Transmission-Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (BST-OFDM) has been adopted in ISDB-T to simultaneously provide a variety of services over a single channel [1]. The bandwidth of each channel is about 6 MHz, and is comprised of 13 segments; 12 out of the 13 segments are currently used for broadcasting of high definition television (HDTV) for the home environment, with the remainder being used for mobile terminals [2].
Broadcasting to mobile terminals employs quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) as a modulation method. Since this modulation method features noise resistance, reception can easily be achieved even in automobiles. However, because the bit rate that can be transmitted in one segment is...
