Digital Wireless Camera Technology Fundamentals

Len Mann

Analog wireless camera systems have been available to the broadcast industry for decades and are in common use at sporting events for sideline coverage of football, pit-lane coverage of car racing, etcetera. Analog systems are essentially line-of-sight systems, meaning that the frequency modulation (FM) used requires an uninterrupted path between the transmitter and receiver. In situations such as transmission in built-up areas where the transmitted signal can be reflected by a number of routes back to the receiver (multipath interference), analog systems can suffer from picture-quality impairments such as ghosting, noise, chroma flutter, or complete loss. Viewers have become used to these impairments, which can occur when watching in-car cameras or marathon coverage, typically when the transmitter passes under a bridge or behind an obstacle. Traditional analog systems, therefore, have never offered true roaming freedom to cameramen. Analog wireless cameras need labor-intensive manual targeting of transmit and receive antennas to ensure a reasonable quality of link.

Print ISSN
Electronic ISSN
2160-2492
Published
2003-12
Content type
Original Research
DOI
10.5594/J12345