DVB-T and DVB-T2 Measurements in Bogota Metropolitan area. Germán D. Castellanos Escuela Colombiana de Ingeniería, Bogotá, Colombia. Abstract After the decision from the Colombian government to implement the European DVB-T and DVB-T2 for digital terrestrial television (DTT), there has been a process for implementation of the technology in the country. With less than seven years away from the analogic shutdown, the implementation of DTT is facing technical and social challenges. Some of these issues are related with the quality of the signal received by users in urban and rural areas. This paper focuses on some measurements done to some Colombian broadcasted channels over DVB-T2 standard and presents its results compared with some simulation realized for the Bogotá metropolitan area. 1. Introduction After a century of broadcasted analogue television, and witnessing the digitalization of television around the globe, the Colombian government decides to implement digital broadcasted television under the European DVB-T standard in 2008, setting up the date of the analogue shut-down to December 2019. With less than seven years to that date, the Colombian government has decided to migrate to DVB-T2 standard which is a newer version of the European one [1]. This decision presents serious challenges for the implementation of DTT in Colombia. For starters, in 2012 in Colombia, 91% of the population is covered by the public channels, while only 86% is covered by the private channels in analogue television [2]. Moreover, by 2009, only 36.7% of urban homes had their TV signal by air reception, while for the rural area was 85% for a total of 44.6% for the national population [3]. This means that the Colombian broadcasted stations have to overlay digital television for these populations in a short time period. Another important issue that the government and Colombians have to overcome is the cost of reception devices. By February 2013, the set top boxes that support DVB-T2 cost nearly col$175.000 which is around US$100, a third of the minimum monthly wage for Colombia. The price of the cheapest TV with DVB-T2 support is the SONY Bravia KDL-22EX357 for col$600.000 about US$350 [2] [4]. Knowing that DTT is intended for rural population, due the impossibility to access to Cable TV, the cost of those device is expensive; hence, some subsidy from the government and broadcasters needs to be implemented if the government want Colombians to use DTT and take advantage of the deployed infrastructure. This article is organized as follows. Section 0, introduces the principles of the implementation of digital terrestrial television (DTT) in Colombia and explains its scenario in the Bogota Metropolitan area. Section III, presents a brief description of the DVB-T standards. Section IV describes the study model used to measure DTT signals. A vast number of measurements and simulations are presented in Section 0. Finally, the article is concluded in Section IV. 2. Overview of Television in Colombia In Colombia, the Terrestrial Digital Television (DTT) was adopted in August 2008 when the formerly National Television Commission (CNTV) decided to implement the European standard Digital Video Broadcast Terrestrial (DVB-T). In January 2010, the first transmission of DTT was made in Bogota, in the Calatrava Mountains in the locality of Suba. This broadcast station serves the metropolitan Bogota area, including northern and western towns with the DVB-T standard. After some implementation of the DVB-T standard in two bigger cities, the Colombian government decided to upgrade the format to the newest version of the standard, the DVB-T2. So far, by May 2013, there were 12 cities with DVB-T2 coverage and only two with DVB-T coverage. This upgrade, allows broadcast stations to transmit several channels over the same bandwidth, including High Definition (HD) television as well as 3D content.