DTMB (GB20600-2006)
In 2006, the Chinese created their own version of the digital terrestrial television broadcast standard. The new standard bears the designation DTMB and is synonymous with the Chinese GB20600-2006 standard, which defines framing structure, channel coding and modulation for the digital television terrestrial broadcast system in the UHF and VHF bands with 8 MHz bandwidth for each RF channel.
DTMB contains single carrier as well as multicarrier options for standard definition (SD) and high definition (HD) content. The single carrier or 3780 multicarriers can be modulated with 4QAM, 16QAM and 64QAM. Various techniques – especially the powerful forward error correction technique – make the standard well-suited for the terrestrial transmission of television content.
The DTMB standard contains two technologies (ADTB-T and DMB-T) that were developed as direct competitors of one another in order to be recognized as the sole digital terrestrial TV standard.
ADTB-T is a single-carrier standard that was developed by Jiaotong University. In contrast, DMB-T, a deployment scenario developed by Tsinghua University, is a multicarrier technique based on OFDM. DMB-T was later expanded to include a handheld component and last bore the designation DMB-T/H.