A traceable approach for measuring key parameters of digital video broadcasting signals

This paper proposes a traceable and practical approach to measure the modulation error ratio (MER) and the power level of digital radio frequency (RF) TV signals. We use calibrated vector signal generator and sampling oscilloscope as both reference and standard to build the MER measurement system and improve the time-base error correction algorithm to increase the accuracy simultaneously; According to the characteristic of digital RF signal which spectrum is similar to noise in a specified frequency band, we adopt an algorithm with spectrum transform and in-band integral to describe the power distribution of frequency components composing the signals. It provides distinct traceable chains between measured physical quantities and metrological benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate that this approach is feasible.