Field Guide · protocol

Also known as: ATSC 3.0, NextGen TV

ATSC 3.0, marketed in the United States as NextGen TV, is the next-generation North American digital terrestrial television standard.1 It breaks compatibility with ATSC 1.0 to adopt an OFDM physical layer with modern LDPC forward error correction, and it carries everything — video, audio, data, and even interactive apps — as IP packets rather than an MPEG transport stream, unifying broadcast and broadband delivery.

HEVC video · AC-4 / MPEG-H audio IP packets (broadcast + broadband) ROUTE / DASH · MMT transport OFDM physical layer · LDPC + BCH FEC 6 MHz air
ATSC 3.0 stacks IP-based media over ROUTE or MMT transport on a flexible OFDM/LDPC physical layer.

Overview

ATSC 3.0 is defined as a suite of documents (the A/300 series) rather than a single spec, reflecting its modular design. The physical layer (A/322) is a highly configurable OFDM waveform: subcarrier constellations from QPSK up to 4096-QAM, several LDPC code rates, and multiple pilot and guard-interval patterns let a broadcaster trade robustness against capacity — even splitting one 6 MHz channel into layered pipes, a rugged one for mobile reception and a high-capacity one for fixed 4K. Every emission begins with a fixed bootstrap signal that a receiver can detect regardless of the service configuration that follows.

Technical characteristics

Property Value
Waveform OFDM (bootstrap + configurable payload)
Subcarrier modulation QPSK, 16- to 4096-QAM (non-uniform constellations)
Inner FEC LDPC (multiple rates)
Outer FEC BCH / CRC
Transport IP via ROUTE/DASH and MMT
Video / audio HEVC (H.265); Dolby AC-4 / MPEG-H
Channel 6 MHz (US); layered/robust modes

History

ATSC finalised the ATSC 3.0 standards in 2017, and the first US commercial NextGen TV stations launched in 2020.2 South Korea deployed ATSC 3.0 ahead of the US, using it for the 2018 Winter Olympics. Because it is not backward compatible with ATSC 1.0, US broadcasters run the two in parallel, sharing spectrum during a lengthy voluntary transition.

Deployment

ATSC 3.0 is rolling out across US markets and is deployed in South Korea. Its IP foundation enables features beyond ATSC 1.0: 4K HDR video, immersive audio, targeted advertising, datacasting, and hooks for future services such as broadcast-assisted positioning. Adoption depends on receiver penetration and on stations completing the 1.0-to-3.0 spectrum shuffle.

Decoding it with GopherTrunk

GopherTrunk does not decode ATSC 3.0; IP-based HEVC television is well outside its land-mobile trunking scope. As with the other digital-TV systems, the RF can be captured by a wideband software-defined radio and processed in dedicated OFDM tools, but the full 6 MHz channel exceeds a narrowband dongle’s bandwidth. The first-generation system it replaces is documented under ATSC 1.0.

Sources

  1. ATSC 3.0 — Wikipedia, for the NextGen TV system, its OFDM physical layer, LDPC coding, and IP transport. ↩

  2. ATSC 3.0 standard — ATSC, the primary document suite defining the ATSC 3.0 physical layer and delivery stack. ↩

See also