A to Z Glossary of Satellite TV Terminologies and their Definition

SAS

SAS means subscriber authorization system. The SAS translates the subscriber information into EMMs. Also, the SAS ensures that the necessary authorization is available to view a certain channel or program.

Satellite Receiver

The indoor electronic component of an earth station which downconverts, processes and prepares satellite signals for viewing or listening.

SAW Filter

A solid-state filter that yields a sharp transition between regions of transmitted and attenuated frequencies.

Scanning

The organized process of moving the electron beam in a television picture tube so an entire scene is drawn as a sequential series of horizontal lines connected by horizontal and vertical retraces.

Scaler

Circuitry or device that converts a video signal to a resolution other than its original format. Scaling can involve upconversion or downconversion, and may also include conversion between progressive- and interlaced-scan formats. A scaler can be built into a TV, an HDTV set-top box, a DVD player, or another video source, or it may be a standalone component.

Scan velocity modulation

TV feature; a circuit that increases the speed of electrons to their respective phosphor dots. Often produces an artificial “hard edge,” which is why it should be switched off for sources such as DVD and HDTV. Used in professional projectors as a form of dithering to reduce the visibility of scan lines. Also called velocity scan modulation or, generically, edge enhancement.

SDTV

Standard-definition television. Digital television format that includes 480-line resolution in both interlaced (480i) and progressively scanned (480p) formats; offers a discernible improvement over conventional analog NTSC picture resolution, with less noise; similar to DVD or satellite TV quality but not considered high-definition television (HDTV).

SECAM

Système Électronique Couleur Avec Memoire, or sequential color with memory. Analog color television broadcast standard developed in the mid-1960s and used in France, its former possessions, and some eastern European countries, including former members of the Soviet Union; offers 819 lines of horizontal resolution.

Selectable aspect ratios

TV feature, especially on a wide-screen and/or digital model, that allows the adjustment of screen proportions for the material being viewed; an image can be adjusted to fill the screen or to have blank bands placed at the top and bottom of a wide-screen image, or the left and right for a 4:3 image on a wide-screen set.

Selectable color temperature

Large-screen TV feature, especially a high-end set, that allows the adjustment of the color temperature.

Service menu

Menu in televisions and some other electronic gear that’s normally accessible only by inputting a special code. The service menu controls many parameters that, if changed, could permanently damage the product, and damage of this kind is usually not covered by the manufacturers’ warranty.

Set-top box(STB)

An external receiver that converts broadcasts (such as analog cable, digital cable, or DTV) for display on a television. HDTV-ready TVs must be connected to a compatible HDTV tuner set-top box in order to receive digital television programs.

SMPTE

– Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, is a professional engineering organization that reviews technological advancements and sets professional video standards.

Spatial artifact:

– A compression-induced DTV image imperfection that occurs in a single field or frame when an image on screen is not translated accurately; often results in fuzzy or slanted edges, often on text. Similar to temporal artifacts, both are often referred to as mosquito noise.

S-Video:

-Common video connection that provides a better picture than composite by transmitting the luminance and chrominance portions of a video signal separately.

Scrambling

A method of altering the identity of a video or audio signal so it cannot be received intelligibly in order to prevent its reception by persons not having authorized decoders.

Screening

A metal, concrete or natural material that screens out unwanted TI from entering a dish or a metal shield that prevents the ingress of unwanted RF signals in an electronic circuit.

SECA

Société Européenne de Contrôle d’Accès (SECA), see Aston Seca.

Section

A portion of a table that conforms to the MPEG-defined syntax

Serrated Vertical Pulse

The television vertical sync pulse which is subdivided into six serrations. These sub-pulses occur at twice the horizontal scanning frequency.

Service

Also called a channel (for instance Eurosport), to which a TV or decoder is tuned. A Service Provider offers one or more services and negotiates with the SMS Operator to market his services as one or more products

Service Provider

The company or institution that provides one or more services like for instance broadcasting satellite television.

Servo Hunting

An oscillatory searching of the feedhorn probe when the use of inadequate gauge control cables results in insufficient voltage at the feedhorn.

Shared Address

The Shared Address (SA) are the first 3 bytes of the PPUA and is used to address cards in a group. A card group can contain a maximum of 256 individual cards.

Side Lobe

A parameter is used to describe the ability of a dish to detect off-axis signals. The larger the side lobes, the more noise, and interference a dish can detect.

Single Channel Per Carrier (SCPC)

A satellite transmission system that employs a separate carrier for each channel, as opposed to frequency division multiplexing that combines many channels on a single carrier.

Signal Dropout

The loss of signal that occurs when the signal becomes too weak to be usable

Signal-to-Noise Ratio

S/N – The ratio of signal power to noise power in a specified bandwidth, usually expressed in decibels

Signature

The signature (the authentication code) is a 5-byte hexadecimal code and is used to secure the data stream. The signature is a kind of checksum control for the data stream.

Skew

A term used to describe the adjustment necessary to fine tune the feed polarity detector when scanning between satellites.

Smartcard

A Chipcardcontaining a processor and some memory. The memory on the card can be altered either by software on a PC and using a programmer as an interface to the card, or it can be altered by the CAM/receiver by means of instructions that are contained in the data stream of the satellite signal.

Subscriber Management System (SMS)

SMS or subscriber management system. The SMS is a subsystem of the CA.It manages the information about a subscriber (such as number, names, addresses, telephone numbers, etc… ) and requests EMM’sfrom the SAS.

SMS-Operator/Provider

The SMS Operator manages customers who subscribe to one or more services. The Service Provider requests that the SMS Operator manages and gather subscription fees from his subscribers and also perform other tasks

Snow

Video noise or sparklies are caused by an insufficient signal-to-noise input ratio to a television set or monitor. r subscriber-related tasks

Solar Outage

The loss of reception occurs when the sun is positioned directly behind a target satellite. When this occurs, solar noise drowns out the satellite signal and reception is lost.

Sparklies

Small black and/or white dashes in a television picture indicate an insufficient signal-to-noise ratio. Also known as snow.

Spherical Dish

A dish system uses a section of a spherical reflector to focus one or more satellite signals to one or a series of focal areas.

Splitter

A device that takes a signal and splits it into two or more identical but for lower power signals.

Subcarrier

A signal that is transmitted within the bandwidth of a stronger signal. In satellite transmissions, a 6.8 MHz audio subcarrier is often used to modulate the C-band carrier.

Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW)

A sound or acoustic wave traveling on the optically polished surface of a piezoelectric material. This wave travels at the speed of sound but can pass frequencies as high as several gigahertz.

Synchronizing Pulses

Pulses imposed on the composite baseband video signal used to keep the television picture scanning in perfect step with the scanning at the television camera. See SAW Filter.

satellite TV glossary & definitions-Part 7

Table

An MPEG structure that can be updated in sections and which can contain any of a variety of data

Thermal Noise

Random, undesired electrical signals caused by molecular motion, are known more familiarly as noise.

Time-Shifted Event

The same program broadcasts on two or more channels, each broadcast starting a fixed period of time after the previous one. This is mainly intended for PPV. For example, the same movie can be started on nine different channels, each delayed 10 minutes from the previous one. A subscriber then has to wait for a maximum of 10 minutes for the start of this movie. The fact that the same movie is transmitted more than

Trace

The movement of the electron beam from left to right on a television screen. the nonce is usually transparent to the subscriber.

Threshold

A minimal signal-to-noise input is required to allow a satellite receiver to deliver an acceptable picture.

Transponder

One circuit on a satellite that receives modulates, amplifiers, and re-transmits an uplinked signal

Transport Stream

An MPEG-2 multiplex with short, fixed-length packets carrying many programs intended for general broadcast over potentially error-prone media, such as a satellite broadcast.

Trap

An electronic device that attenuates a selected band of frequencies in a signal. Also known as a notch filter.

Terrestrial broadcast

– Standard over-the-air broadcasts, as opposed to satellite or cable transmission.

Upconvert:

– In DTV, converting from a lower-resolution input signal to a TV capable of displaying higher resolutions, such as from an SDTV 480p signal to an HDTV 1080i native display.

Vertical compression:

– A feature found on 4:3 TVs is designed to take advantage of the extra resolution in anamorphic DVDs and other wide-screen content. Pioneered by Sony, this feature squeezes the TV raster so that the electron beam scans in a smaller area. It requires setting the DVD player to 16:9 mode, eliminates anamorphic downconversion artifacts, and ideally provides a 33 percent increase in resolution in the letterboxed image.

Vertical frequency

– In television, the number of vertical fields per second is measured in Hertz. NTSC has a vertical frequency of 60Hz, whereas PAL has 50Hz.

Vertical resolution

– The number of horizontal lines (or pixels) that can be resolved from the top of an image to the bottom. (Think of hundreds of horizontal lines or dots stacked on one another.) The vertical resolution of the analog NTSC TV standard is 525 lines. Some lines carry other data such as closed-captioning text, test signals, and so on, so we end up with about 480 lines in the final image. The typical NTSC sources, including VHS VCRs, cable, and over-the-air broadcast TV (analog), non-HD digital satellite TV, DVD players, camcorders, and so forth, have a vertical resolution of 480 lines. DTV signals have a vertical resolution that ranges from 480 lines for SDTV to 720 or 1,080 lines for HDTV.

VSB

– Vestigial sideband. A type of digital television transmission technology, the U.S. DTV standard uses 8VSB

UART

Short for Universal Asynchronous Receiver-Transmitter. The UART is a computer component that handles asynchronous serial communication. Every computer contains a UART to manage the serial ports.

UHF

Ultrahigh frequencies range from 300 to 3,000 MHz. North American TV channels 14 through 83. African and European TV channels 21 to 69.

Upconverter

A device that increases the frequency of a transmitted signal.

Uplink

The earth station electronics and antenna transmit information to a communication satellite.

Vertical Blanking Pulse

A pulse is used during the vertical retrace period at the end of each scanning field to extinguish illumination from the electron beam.

Vertical Sync Pulse

A series of pulses occur during the vertical blanking interval to synchronize the scanning process at the television with that created at the studio. See also Serrated Vertical Pulse.

VHF

Very high frequencies. The lower frequency range for terrestrial television broadcasts.

Viaccess

A coding system that is gaining increased popularity among providers lately. Viaccess is widely used in France and by several providers in the northeast of Europe. It is a relative newcomer.

Videoguard

A coding system that is used by English-based Sky Television mainly.

White-field uniformity:

– The evenness of a field of white across a television screen.

Wide-screen:

– Image with an aspect ratio greater than 1.33:1 or a picture wider and narrower than a standard television image. Typically refers to TVs in the 16:9 aspect ratio.

Windowbox bars:

– The blank bars on the left and right of a 4:3 image when displayed on a wide-screen 16:9 display. They can often be adjusted in intensity from black to grey; grey bars help exercise CRT, and plasma displays more evenly across the screen.

Y Pb Pr:

– Luminance, two chrominance channels of blue minus luminance, red minus luminance. Technical shorthand for component video.

Y Cb Cr:

– Luminance, two chrominance channels of blue minus luminance, red minus luminance. Technical shorthand for component video.

Y R-Y B-Y:

– Luminance, two chrominance channels of red minus luminance, blue minus luminance. Technical shorthand for component video.