Tektronix Waveform Monitor Enhancements Keep Users Ahead of the DTV Transition Curve

Tektronix Inc., a leading worldwide provider of test, measurement and monitoring instrumentation, announced significant enhancements to its industry leading flagship waveform monitor and rasterizer product family including a number of industry first features, further strengthening Tektronix’ position as the worldwide leader in digital waveform monitors. Enhanced functionality allows broadcasters, network operators, and content providers to detect and diagnose problems in video and audio quality and detect ancillary data problems more efficiently and effectively – enabling an increased level of quality and strengthening their service differentiation in a highly competitive environment.

Faced with a challenging economic environment, network operators and content providers need to ensure that engineering, operations or production teams can quickly detect, isolate and diagnose signal and content (video, audio, ancillary data) quality problems before they reach their customers and potentially incurring penalties or other often avoidable expenses. The Tektronix family of multi-format, multi-standard waveform monitors, empowered by the patented See and Solve™ user interface, provide the most precise, highly reliable, and broadest range of easy-to-use tools for every critical monitoring point in the digital video ecosystem.

The new enhancements give Tektronix waveform monitors and rasterizers the industry’s most comprehensive ancillary data decoding and monitoring support. The instruments now offer – for the first time in the industry – simultaneous decoding and monitoring of CEA-708 and CEA-608 Closed Captioning data, meeting the latest FCC requirements. The units now also support Active Format Description (AFD) and CGMS-A / Broadcast Flag data decoding and monitoring. For multi-channel audio, new Dolby E Guard Band monitoring provides user selectable thresholds and an intuitive bar meter display – an industry first for usability – on the audio display to make it easy for operators to spot Dolby E audio problems. Additionally, new black picture and patented frozen picture detection alarms help broadcasters and network operators detect, identify, and diagnose picture quality problems more effectively.

“The pressure to deliver high quality video continues to mount for broadcasters and content producers alike, whether to meet consumer quality expectations or to minimize costly errors or service interruptions,” said Eben Jenkins, director, Video Test, Tektronix. “Aggressive, continuous enhancements ensure our waveform monitors provide the industry’s most robust video monitoring capabilities such as 3Gb/s SDI support introduced last year. Now, we are following up with additional enhancements to offer customers even more efficient quality monitoring and problem resolution.”

Pricing & Availability

To take advantage of the new features and enhancements, current customers can upgrade qualifying products with free firmware, downloadable from the Tektronix website (www.tektronix.com) beginning in June. Models that will support the new enhancements include WFM7120, WFM7020, WFM6120, WFM7100 with Option FP, WFM7000 with Option FP, and WFM6100 with Option FP waveform monitors and WVR7120, WVR7020, WVR6020, WVR7100, WVR7000, and WVR6100 rasterizers.

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About Tektronix

Tektronix is a leading supplier of test, measurement, and monitoring products, solutions and services for the communications, computer, and semiconductor industries - as well as military/aerospace, consumer electronics, education and a broad range of other industries worldwide. With 60 years of experience, Tektronix enables its customers to design, build, deploy, and manage next-generation global communications networks,computing and advanced technologies. Headquartered in Beaverton, Oregon, Tektronix has operations in 19 countries worldwide. Tektronix' Web address is www.tektronix.com.

Tektronix is a registered trademark of Tektronix, Inc. All other trade names referenced are the service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.