Customer Reviews

Modern Cable Television Technology: Video, Voice, and Data Communications (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
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The text covers the subject of cable television from an introductory level up to engineering levels. I particularly liked the coverage of current issues in cable, such as Impulse pay per view. The chapter on modulation was informative. With my physics background I was happy to see the book has a good scattering of equations. An equation is indispensable in many situations.

This encyclopedic reference appears to do a good job of spanning the tremendous range of technology comprising satellite transmission and reception ("transception"); head-end organization; regional and "last mile" distribution; and set-top box technology, steering (unfortunately) way clear of the hardware, firmware, and software issues associated with providing modern unidirectional and bidirectional digital services atop multiple tuners in home network (including up-and-coming IPTV) environments supporting slavable hard drives. HOWEVER, being an electrical engineer and, therefore, having naturally started with the chapter on modulation and analog detection, I was WOEFULLY disappointed. It is fine to author mathematical treatments with a heavy hand ("It is imperative that one understand ...," etc.), but one had better know what one is talking about. This is clearly not the case. Where mathematics are presented as putative groundwork for some forthcoming exposition, they are erroneous and weak. Irrelevant theorems from high-school trigonometry are cited as if they are the be-all and end-all of signal analysis. The description of run-of-the-mill Fourier analysis is flawed and terminologically imprecise. The Nyquist theorem is casually referred to as "Harry Nyquist's rule" and cited as if it were a side-effect rather than a vital principle--a principle that is clearly way beyond the authors' understanding, insofar as I never saw any development of the sampling theorem or the expansion of bandlimited functions in terms of sinc (no, NOT sync) pulses. Now, when I studied communication systems, it was critical to have a crystalline understanding of how the signal and power spectra morphed as one proceeds from block to block throughout the (analog or digital) system. Yet, the authors are unable to do this, muffing through vague mention of "X Hz of single sideband and Y Hz of double sideband" and obfuscatory, misleading diagrams of time-domain phenomena accompanied with similarly vague notions of orthogonal this or quadrature that but--you guessed it--steering clear of any precise mathematical exposition (a la Hilbert transforms or diagrams that clearly indicate signal spectra, satellite spectra, aliased sidelobes, etc.) while fumbling through discussions of "two layers" of filtering that attempt to lump transmission "filtering" and reception "filtering" into one logical task without asserting or fully executing any conceptual paradigm whereby the one logically inverts the other. Where is the sampling theorem? Where is the fundamental mathematical expression of amplitude modulation? Where is a clear diagram that demonstrates how the I, Q, and L analog TV signals are multiplexed? Why is there discussion of envelope detection without any mention of the Schwarz inequality? "Constellations" of QAM, QPSK, etc., "signals" are diagrammed without the merest mention of what one is actually looking at, viz., message vectors in Kotelnikoff space based upon an eigenvalue expansion achieved via Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization. What really blew me away, though, was--brief though it was--the most nonsensical statement of all: The authors were discussing various directions in digital compression, and I saw a subchapter heading entitled, "Fractals." I said to myself, "Wow! That's great! I wonder what they've managed and how." Well, the "explanation" was nothing more than, "Fractals are really useful; the only problem is in figuring out the equations." That's like a math student telling his teacher, "I've got the solution to the problem! The only thing I'm missing is the detailed algebraic expansion!"

Every technical library should include this easy to understand volume explaining all aspects of cable television. The authors have drawn from their years of education and practical experience in the Cable industry to produce an excellent reference guide for anyone interested in television and cable technology. Included are chapters on Analog TV, Digital Compression, Cable Data Transport,Headend Signal Processing, Coax, Fiber, Consumer Interface and Equipment Compatability, and other topics. Great minds have produced a fine book!

Well done compilation that is approachable while covering a lot of ground. If you need one book that touches on all the technology aspects of the cable industry and can fit on your bookshelf, this is it. I highly recommend it.

This book is a remarkable survey of a very broad field. It is necessarily somewhat superficial in its coverage of some of the more abstruse topics, but provides the necessary essentials an engineer needs to operate in the cable television environment. Unlike mere compendia of archival publications, this book has a consistent pedagogical viewpoint and notation. It is oriented towards practicing engineers, providing just enough theory to support successful problem solving. I recommend it to anyone working in the field.

This book lays out a great foundation of the technologies you will find in a cable system, and in many cases the content of the book delves much deeper then the basics. I used this book as the primary resource when studying for both of my SCTE certifications the BTS and the BTCS, this book covered about 80% of the exam topics.

The biggest (and basically only) downside to this book is its extremely limited coverage of IP technology. Granted there are other resources out there that one can use to supplement this body of work, but given the importance that IP plays in telecommunications networks I would like to see covered in more detail (though I don't know if the book were any bigger that it could be bound.)

Overall this is a great, comprehensive book, and worth having it on your desk.

Comprehensive in some degree but lack of details. Not quite useful to me. Have to read other books to get a better picture. In simple words, don't buy this book with your own money!

This is a very good book for someone interested in the CATV industry.

It gives you a good explanation of the technologies that allow CATV companies the ability to provide all the services now available.

It does this in one book, so that you don't have to hunt through several books to find what you need, when you need it.

In a quick growing market, and with daily technological improvements like cable television, the lack of a thoroughly comprehensive compilation was being noticed. This book, a kind of Bible for that specific area of telecommunications engineering, could approach a vast variety of technical and operational issues for the CATV industry. A vade mecum (lat. ¨goes with me¨, means essential) for every CATV engineer or technician.