Automatic adjustment of receiver apparatus based on channel-bit-error-rate-related parameter measurement

摘要

Alignment of an antenna (14) and a polarizer (16) for the antenna are automatically adjusted and the frequency setting of a frequency-tunable receiver (11) is automatically adjusted while receiving a broadcast communication signal that is forward-error-correction coded by processing (34) the forward-error-correction code of the received signal to measure a channel-bit-error-rate-related parameter for the received signal; by realigning the antenna and the polarizer from their respective initial positions in response to the measured parameter until the measured parameter is minimized: and by retuning the receiver from its initial frequency setting in response to the measured parameter until the measured parameter is minimized. A Viterbi decoder (35) processes the forward-error-correction code of the received signal to compute path metrics related to the bit-error rate of the received signal and normalizes the computed path metrics; and a counter (36) counts the normalizations over fixed intervals to measure a path metric normalization rate as the measured parameter.