Advanced RF for HD Radio Cameras

This project was set up to develop the techniques and equipment needed to provide practical, high bitrate, high efficiency transmission for HD radio cameras used both on location and in the studio. This work is being carried out against a background of scarce and increasingly expensive bandwidth.

The original analogue radio cameras were prone to interference caused by multipath reflections – the signal from one camera could easily interfere with that of another. The advent of the digital radio camera eliminated this problem. The progression to an HD radio camera system may seem like the next logical step but the selling off of parts of the radio spectrum by the government has seen the bandwidth available for this technology shrink while its associated cost has risen.

In an attempt to address this problem we’ve been examining the possible use of state-of-the-art MIMO (Multiple In-Multiple Out) techniques, which allow two or more antennas to transmit on the same frequency and two or more receivers to unscramble the same frequency. By using these MIMO techniques we hope to get more capacity within the same narrow spectrum.

We are currently investigating how to build a decoder that can get close to the theoretical and practical limits of such a system. Should we achieve this it would lead to huge savings within both news and sport coverage. We hope to have a prototype ‘half-spectrum’ 5MHz-channel radio camera system available to show to industry within one year, with more advanced variants including a high-capacity studio camera link emerging over the following four years.