Patent ID: 8290035

Claim:
In transmitter apparatus for a digital television broadcast signal manifested as an electromagnetic wave subjected to vestigial sideband amplitude modulation in accordance with an eight-level modulating signal, said eight-level modulating signal formed by two-thirds trellis coding of convolutionally byte-interleaved 207-byte Reed-Solomon codewords generated from 187-byte packets beginning with respective 3-byte headers and concluding with respective 184-byte contents, the improvement wherein: the contents of special ones of said 187-byte packets encapsulate respective segments of byte-interleaved parallel concatenated convolutional codewords; the headers of said special ones of said 187-byte packets indicate their special nature; said parallel concatenated convolutional codewords encode Reed-Solomon-coded ancillary data, time-division multiplexing bytes of said Reed-Solomon-coded ancillary data with bytes of a first parity determination and with bytes of a second parity determination; and the byte interleaving of said parallel concatenated convolutional codewords disposes the bytes of each of them transversally within the contents of said special ones of said 187-byte packets.