The DATV-Express Project
A few DATV-Express boards are still available in inventory as of 9/13/2017. Order through PayPal using the "Purchase A Board" tab above. Thank you for your interest.
The DATV-Express is a digital Amateur TeleVision exciter/transmitter (assembled board with software) that can operate on ham radio bands from 70 MHz to 2.45 GHz.
We are a small group of Amateur Radio Operators involved with Amateur TV (ATV) who have come together to provide an economical answer to the question that hams interested in digital-ATV have been asking for a long time: Where can I economically purchase MPEG2 / H.264 encoder boards and Digital-ATV exciter boards?
A ham-grade set of MPEG-2-and-DVB-S boards from SR-Sys in Germany cost about US $875.00. The cost of commercial-grade digital-TV boards is even higher. This high cost is known to prevent many hams from trying Digital-ATV. Because of this, a group of hams in the US and England got together at the end 0f 2010 to start a project that will lower the cost of DATV considerably.
We hope that this web site will provide information that can be used by the Amateur radio's digital-ATV community for getting into this exciting mode of Amateur Radio.
The picture below (courtesy of G8GTZ & GB3HV) shows how digital-ATV can improve signal quality over analog-ATV using the same antenna and power-level.
This open-source project is known as DATV-EXPRESS. The team members are:
- Art Towslee - WA8RMC - electronics design
- Charles Brain - G4GUO - software design
- Tom Gould - WB6P - PCB Layout design
- Ken Konechy -W6HHC - Project Management and publications
System Block Diagram for DATV-Express for Linux
The most important concept about the DATV-Express board is that it is software-based SDR radio. While the system block diagram for a typical Digital-ATV DVB-S transmitter using the DATV-Express board is shown below, the modulator chip and software can also produce several other types of modulations and protocols, such as COFDM for DVB-T and 32APSK for DVB-S2.
System Block Diagram of typical DATV-Express transmitter set-up for DVB-S running Ubuntu OS
And what does the board look like?
The DATV-Express PCBA is sold fully-assembled and fully-tested
System Block Diagram for using with Windows OS
The DATV-Express project team has released the Express_DVB-S_Transmitter software for the Windows OS. This Windows-based software allows using any Intel / AMD 32-bit or 64-bit desktop PC or notebook computer to drive the DATV-Express hardware board using DVB-S protocol for DATV. The Express_DVB-S_Transmitter software allows eliminating the Hauppauge hardware encoders by using FFmpeg CODEC encoders in software, The latest v1.25 software for Windows also includes the DVB-S2 protocol and RB-DATV (Reduced Bandwidths) with bandwidths down to 0.5 MHz (333 KSymb/sec) and lower for more robust reception.(improved S/N).
System Block Diagram using WINDOWS OS with DATV-Express set-up for DVB-S
System Block Diagram for using with ODROID U3
The DATV-Express project team has also released DATV-Software for the very small "micro-PC" called ODROID model U3. The small ARM-based ODROID can eliminate the need for a full-size PC or even a bulky notebook computer to drive the DATV-Express hardware board.
System Block Diagram using ODROID with DATV-Express set-up for DVB-S