A Low Cost Digital Television STB Back-end with Cable Remote Control

Television is part of our life today. In developing countries, analog TV sets can significantly outnumber telephones or PCs. Advances in multimedia industry, particularly the advent of digital TV will make television much more attractive. Many cameras and production studios are totally digital. More and more transmission infrastructures are going digital. However, full digital domestic TV receivers are rather expensive and therefore, a meanwhile solution goes through using a gateway commonly called Set-Top-Box (STB) connecting to the conventional analog TV sets. Commercially available STBs are locally controlled by InfraRed (IR) devices. This is the main reason that keeps the analog TV spatially close to the STBs. This paper aims to address an electrical remote control solution for STBs. Thus, the analog TV set can be placed far way from the STB. The novelty of this paper consists in a FSK receiver without PLL leading to a phase error free system as well as to a low cost implementation. Unlike other commercially available IR remote control extension systems, this purely FSK system makes use of a very narrow band around 10 MHz to transmit both binary symbols.