Abstract: 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.