FALCON AF-32 Switching Card

The AF-ASISYNC card provides the most advanced DVB-ASI protection switching available in the market. The advanced feature set allows for applications in play-outs as well as reception points, i.e. transmitter sites, in redundant contribution and distribution networks. The transparent handling of the input streams enables the use in SFN applications. For seamless switching identical, probably time shifted MPEG-2 transport streams are required at the inputs. In this scenario, given at the receiving end of a redundant transmission line, the switch first will synchronize the two input signals before performing a protection switching. The synchronization doesn’t require any time reference, neither within the streams nor as an external input. The switch can compensate a differential delay of up to 87.381 TS packets, which corresponds to 6.5s for a TS rate of 20Mbps. Moreover, after synchronization the switch can replace corrupted TS packets, being identified either by the TEI (Transport Error Indicator) or an uncorrectable MPEG-RS (Reed- Solomon Code inside 204 Byte packets), by the corresponding packet from the other input, improving the quality of the output signal in case, where both inputs are affected by errors. In non-seamless mode, where the input signals are generated by different sources, i.e. redundant multiplexers, the protection switching can be triggered by detection of missing PIDs by monitoring the repetition rate of individual PIDs. For each PID monitoring a weight can be configured, allowing a prioritization in case, where elementary streams are missing in both inputs.