Ultra-cheap SDR Digital Television Transmission: ISDB-T with an osmo-fl2k and an RTL-SDR

Abstract

We present the implementation in GNU Radio of an ISDB-T transmitter, the digital television standard used in most South American and some Asian and Central American countries. All the configurable parameters of the standard (such as mode, time interleaver’s depth or coding rate) are accessible from the block’s parameters, and they were thoroughly tested using commercial TVs in over-the-air transmissions (as well as other SDRs). We have also tested different SDR models as transmitters. In particular, we have successfully used an osmo-fl2k (a 15$ USB3- to-VGA adapter repurposed as an SDR) as an ISDB-T transmitter. This, together with the 1- seg feature of the standard (i.e. a signal of less than 500 kHz of bandwidth that can be decoded on its own) makes it ideal for an ultra-cheap video transmission setup since, as we show, even an RTL-SDR is capable of decoding the signal. The complete code is available at https: //github.com/git-artes/gr-isdbt.