Fiber-optic subcarrier multiplexing video transport employing multilevel QAM

The technical feasibility of applying a fiber-optic multilevel QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation) subcarrier multiplexing scheme to a multichannel conventional TV signal transport is explored. This transport scheme has some advantageous features. Because a digital subcarrier modulation scheme is used, a high-quality transmission performance is expected to be achieved, if the bit error is sufficiently small over a transmission line and the required carrier-to-noise ratio (CNR) is relatively small among the many candidates of subcarrier modulation schemes. The use of multilevel modulation allows the bandwidth to be efficiently utilized; consequently, up to 40-channel uncompressed digital TV signals are estimated to be accommodated in the frequency region of the VHF and UHF bands, where well-developed and inexpensive electronics can be easily applied