Autumn 2007 STRL Bulletin

NHK Science and Technical Research Laboratories ISSN 1345-4099 Automatic Activation of -Seg Receivers Ensuring safety and security wherever you go no. 32 Research on automatic activation of One-Seg receivers CONTENTS he emergency warning Automatic reception of broadcasting system is designed Low-power stand-by mode emergency warning broadcasting to deliver disaster-related T Feature information on events such as Automatic Activation of One-Seg earthquakes and as promptly Receivers ...... 1 as possible, by automatically turning on New Technology for Spread of One- TV and receivers that are Seg ...... 2 compliant with the system. It has been Multimedia Browsing System for Visually operating since 1985 as an analog "We are now interrupting our regular Impaired Persons ...... 9 broadcasting service. Digital terrestrial programming to report news of an earthquake. Information related to a broadcasting, which began in 2003, also possible is as follows....". About us has an emergency warning broadcast Figure 1 Automatic activation of One-Seg Overview of NHK STRL...... 18 mechanism and is now in operation. receivers through emergency warning broadcasts

Recently, One-Seg receivers for Challenge / Topics/ R&D / Invention / cellular phones and other portable devices have become very Treatise / popular. These receivers allow users to view digital terrestrial broadcasting wherever they go. It would be extremely useful to NHK Technology incorporate an automatic activation function into these One-Seg receivers so they can receive emergency warning broadcasts. To accomplish this, the Science & Technical Research Laboratories have been developing receivers that will be compliant with the system. Automatic activation requires constant monitoring for a specific signal, called the Figure 2 Prototype emergency warning emergency warning broadcast activation flag, broadcasting activation flag receiver which is multiplexed into the regular digital terrestrial broadcasting radio-waves. This continuous operation requires technologies to minimize the power consumption in the monitoring circuit. Disaster Prevention Awareness Park 2007 September 1st is "Disaster Awareness Day" in . NHK runs a disaster prevention campaign during this time of the year by broadcasting disaster awareness specials and covering disaster prevention events. On September 1st and 2nd of this year, a "Disaster Prevention Awareness Park 2007" was set up near the NHK Broadcasting Center in , . The event had an exhibit on One-Seg receivers with the automatic activation function. Emergency Earthquake News Flash Starting on October 1 of this year, all of NHK's and radio channels will be able to interrupt their broadcasts to deliver "Emergency Earthquake News Flashes" by the Japan Meteorological Agency that may be able to warn citizens in advance of the earthquake. Since this service has not yet been tied in with the automatic receiver activation mechanism, we will develop a technology to enable this. STRL

Broadcast Technology no.32, Autumn 2007 C NHK STRL 1