Digital Frontiers

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Transmitting the Signal

Spanish companies have taken advantage of the country’s geography to devise solutions to digital television broadcasting challenges. In 1999, Spain became the first country to use a single-frequency network for digital television. 

Due to the challenges of Spanish geography, with its many towns hidden in valleys between mountains, small transmitters with low power were needed. Though most major companies didn’t bother to fill this niche, the Galician company Egatel devised low power transmitters. And so when in 1999 the national broadcaster requested bids for companies to provide transmitters for the upcoming digital television network, Egatel won 66 percent of the country’s market share. They began to manufacture high-power transmitters as well, eventually winning the bid to provide transmitters for 90 percent of the digital coverage.

But with antennas transmitting on the same frequency, “you have a feedback from the transmitting antenna… So we developed software that cancels echoes, all the noise that you have when you transmit the signal from a receiving antenna to a new transmitter antenna,” says Javier Taibo, international sales manager for Egatel. Today, many countries now use single-frequency networks, and Egatel sells its products worldwide.

Digital television products have proven to be a major success for the Spanish company Ikusi, located in San Sebastian. (Ikusi means vision in the Basque language). Founded half a century ago in a garage by Angel Iglesias, who still heads the company, Ikusi grew in its first few decades from a television installation company to a major manufacturer of reception and distribution equipment.  Its research and development laboratory was founded in 1964, and “innovation has always been key,” says Marco Domínguez, Ikusi’s director of technology.

The company expanded from television communications into other sectors more than 30 years ago, and today it is an important player in the integration of networks and electronic systems for markets such as banking, airports, railway, road infrastructures, and security centers. A current research project named iToll involves the development of an intelligent toll system without physical barriers, which combines computer vision and electronic payment and—in the future—will integrate satellite vehicle-positioning systems. iToll will allow for the free flow of vehicles, which will no longer need to slow down for toll collection.

The potential for significant growth in mobile television has inspired additional research in that field. The company Sidsa, which designed and sells chips that allow what’s known as “conditional access” in the boxes for cable or digital television, is looking to the potentially astronomical growth of mobile television. Engineers developed a bidirectional chip for television reception that both receives signals and returns them, useful for mobile handsets that receive a television signal and return the signal of their location.

And Sapec has capitalized on its audio processing experience to develop a range of products for audio and video compression that allow for accurate transmission while preserving bandwidth. “We’re now working on new algorithms for better compression that will be useful for receiving television on your mobile phone,” says Miguel Cristóbal, Sapec’s managing director.

Televes, one of the largest Spanish manufacturers of antennas, amplifiers, receivers, and satellite dishes, has the biggest market share in Spain for in-home receivers and digital signal processors and sells its products in more than 50 countries around the world. In 2002 Televes created a system of transmitting signals through a house utilizing coaxial cable, the copper antenna cable used by TV companies. This system allows the company to use the cable for multiple services in a home or building to optimize telecommunications, integrating remote control, video surveillance, and data networks.

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