Patent ID: 8200149

Claim:
A broadcast system for wirelessly transmitting a plurality of elementary data streams to a plurality of receivers, comprising: a multiplexer, disposed at a first entity, for generating a single data stream from the plurality of elementary streams; an encoder, communicatively coupled to the multiplexer and disposed at the first entity, the encoder for error correction encoding the single data stream; a demultiplexer, communicatively coupled to the encoder and disposed at the first entity, the demultiplexer for demultiplexing the single data stream into N transponder streams; a transmitter, communicatively coupled to the demultiplexer and disposed at the first entity, for separately modulating and wirelessly transmitting each of the N transponder streams; a wide-band virtual transponder, disposed in a second entity remote from the first entity, for receiving the N transponder streams from the first entity and transmitting the N transponder streams to the plurality of receivers, the wide-band virtual transponder comprised of N narrow-band physical transponders, each of the N narrow-band physical transponders for receiving an associated one of the N transponder streams and transmitting the associated one of the N transponder streams to the plurality of receivers on a different portion of a signal spectrum than the other N narrow-band physical transponders, the signal spectrum comprising a legacy signal spectrum wherein each different portion of the signal spectrum comprises a guard band of the legacy signal spectrum.