Signal selection method of a directional diversity for VSB receiver

We propose an output signal selection method for the directional diversity in VSB receiver which is to improve the reception performance of VSB system in severe Rayleigh fading channel. The VSB system has only about 0.3% of known training signal for the receiver in a data field and the reception performance of VSB receiver is degraded significantly when there are near-0 dB ghosts in received signal. To overcome this problem, the directional diversity is suggested. In directional diversity the selection of an output signal with best channel condition in point of VSB equalizer is very important to improve VSB reception performance. For the selection of the optimal signal, we extracted channel profiles in time domain for all the signals by correlating the PN511 sequence in VSB field sync and selected one signal by comparing the channel profiles. The simulation results show that the proposed method selects a signal with the best channel condition among the signals, so the reception performance of the VSB system can be improved in severe Rayleigh channels.