Tektronix and Fotronic Corporation of Melrose Massachusetts hosted the New England Section meeting on September 10th at the Holiday Inn in Boxborough. Tektronix and Fotronic designed a meeting on SD/HD video and MPEG Monitoring. The presentations were made by Karl Kuhn, Senior Video Application Engineer from Tektronix and Chairman of the Washington DC Section.

The morning session provided a quick overview of SD & HD video foundation concept including verifying signal integrity (eye/jitter), gamut and space compliance, and alignment of plant timing. Other topics included Ancillary Data & Closed Captioning, Dolby E, Digital Data & Metadata, and 3 Gbps – both Single Link and Dual Link.

The afternoon presentation gave an overview of MPEG technology to provide context for the Monitoring and test challenges. Testing differences between RF and IP-based networks were also examined along with some interesting historical insight. Karl did a great job bridging the gap between old and new technology. Equipment was available for demonstrations at the end of each session.

-Kevin Lessard.