A software-based real-time DVB-C2 receiver

Abstract

DVB's second generation system for cable transmission DVB-C2 has been standardized in the beginning of 2009. This also set the starting point for the development of DVB-C2 equipment. Nevertheless, in the early stage a complete transmission chain for demonstrating DVB-C2 was not available. Therefore, we developed a DVB-C2 receiver employing a Software Defined Radio (SDR) approach. The system utilizes a standard PC and is able to decode an 8 MHz channel with 4096-QAM modulation in real-time. The developed receiver was used for the world's very first DVB-C2 transmission and will be extended to DVB-T2 in the near future.