Method for measuring recovery time of digital television receiver

Recovery time of digital television (DTV) receiver is an important indicator of DTV service quality but the recovery time can not be measured directly with existing equipments. A new method was presented which measure the recovery time by bit error rate (BER) tester and impulse noise source through a series of the errored seconds caused by impulse noise. Different from the traditional way, a random trigger of pulses was used in this method, which resulted that the estimation of recovery time was not associated with the pulses start time. Without limit of the impulse noise length, the method can be used for measuring recovery time of the longer timeinterleaver transmission systems. The recovery time measured in this method is with a precision of 0.1s, which is an order of magnitude lower than past experiments. The effect of experimental parameters on recovery time was analyzed with the test result in a digital terrestrial multimedia broadcasting (DTMB) receiver.