Posted on July 5, 2020 in ATSC News
Starting his career with AT&T Consumer Products in Indianapolis, Kevin Shelby began his journey with a passion for image processing and the wonders of technology. He then continued to travel on an internship to New Jersey to work for Bell Labs in researching low bit-rate video coding that guided AT&T to the development of their one and only commercial videophone. However, after further research on the matter, video quality had significantly decreased due to its bandwidth being severely limited.
“This prompted me to focus more energy on the communications path these signals might take as opposed to how they were encoded in the first place,” Shelby explains, discussing his journey that saw him returning to Bell Labs, and then going to Lucent, Alereon, and eventually Austin-based Coherent Logix. As Director of Software Defined Radio (SDR) Application Development, Shelby now supports a group that is in charge of SDR application design along with real-time implementation.
Shelby became involved with ATSC when Coherent Logix hopped on board back in 2007. During this time, a committee had been created to study modifications for enabling mobile and handheld reception of ATSC 1.0. After a few years passed, Shelby’s company had decided to engage with the development of ATSC 3.0. They partnered with Sinclair Broadcast Group allowing Shelby to “craft technical aspects of the proposal around industry objectives they deemed as essential for the business moving forward.”
He and his company contributed to the A/321 and A/322 physical layer standards, contributions Shelby explains as “the bootstrap and frame structure most notably. as well as the sampling arrangement among other things.”
Shelby’s company also built an early transmitter along with a receiver system prototype used to demonstrate the capability and success of an OFDM transport. Shelby said that aspects for this system design are still in active use while Coherent Logix migrates to its current generation processor. Shelby was just named co-chair of ATSC Planning Team 8, “tasked with studying the merits of adding core networking capability to the ATSC 3.0 broadcast standard,” he says.
Shelby believes that ATSC’s 3.0 digital TV standard will change broadcasting by moving fully to an IP transport. He explains that Internet Protocol (IP) will be hugely beneficial even though there is still a lot of work to be done. He also describes that the move to OFDM will “enable robust ATSC reception in environments comparable to those addressed by the access networks with which ATSC hopes to converge, 3GPP 5G most notably.”
Outside of his time in the office, Shelby finds solace in his passion for writing fiction. “Writing provides a creative outlet that is decidedly not all ones and zeroes.” He spends time mountain biking and is an avid skateboarder. Shelby has three boards, one of which he owned since he was a teenager. He also describes himself as a “fearless father,” raising two women that are now in their early 20s. “The fearless part stems more from when they were going through their early teens,” Shelby adds.
“Putting our ATSC PT8 work into perspective, I foresee a bright future that encompasses fixed as well as mobile reception, automated provisioning and content distribution to enable new markets including V2X, UAV, IoT, and broadcast offload/spectrum sharing with mobile carriers. The capabilities under investigation in various planning teams have potential to give ATSC 3.0 a legitimate seat at the table alongside competing broadcast access methods, those offered by the carriers among them,” Shelby says.
Posted in ATSC News
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