The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Sep. 14, 2004
Filed:
Apr. 17, 2000
Christopher Ryan Nokes, Tadworth, GB;
Oliver Paul Haffenden, Tadworth, GB;
Jonathan Highton Stott, Tadworth, GB;
Peter Neil Moss, Tadworth, GB;
British Broadcasting Corporation, London, GB;
Abstract
A diversity receiver for receiving digital signals has a soft-decision decoder in each of its receiving sections, to provide confidence values for the received decoded digital values, and combines the values from the receiving sections in dependence upon the confidence values. The receiver is especially suitable for use with COFDM, and has two sections, the outputs of which are applied to a soft-decision combiner which combines the signals in dependence upon confidence values received from the demodulators. The output is then applied to a Viterbi decoder. The combining can simply involve switching but preferably involves averaging. Synchronisation and squelching can be provided. The system can be used with frequency diversity, spatial or polarisation diversity, or with antenna pattern diversity, in which case it can constitute an automatic rotator. The system automatically switches between different types of diversity reception, e.g. frequency and spatial diversity, in dependence upon the received signal quality.