Terrestrial digital broadcasting delivers regional information across vast areas and serves as a vital source of information in disaster-prone Japan. Given its critical role, continuously monitoring the RF reception in each region is essential.
In light of this, we propose the Terrestrial Digital RF Monitoring Service: PromBee, a practical solution for ongoing monitoring within the constraints of limited personnel and budget.
PromBee is a system that utilizes PromBee Probe, an IoT device for RF monitoring, installed across multiple reception areas to monitor RF signals via the internet. It is offered as a subscription service with flexible contracts, available per unit and per month. The PromBee Probe is simple to set up—just connect it to an antenna and the internet, and it’s ready to use from day one, with no complex system configurations required.
As the importance of SFN (Single Frequency Network) increases for efficient use of radio frequency resources, PromBee plays a crucial role in identifying issues, such as reception disturbances that occur only in specific regions. The example on the right illustrates the kind of reception issues that inspired the development of this system, where PromBee proves to be an effective solution for detecting such disturbances.。
System Overview Diagram
Screen Images
Understand the situation through graphical visualization
You can monitor three types of graphs: Reception Level (blue), CNR (green), and BER (orange). The example above shows data from the past two years, where the reception level fluctuates seasonally, suggesting a case of suspected fading phenomenon.
The example below the graph shows a two-day period. In this case, although the reception level has not changed significantly, both CNR and BER have deteriorated sharply, indicating a suspected case of SFN desynchronization.
