By Robert Cowart, Viking Company
These days we find ourselves building more and more systems into areas that alreadY have available to t hem strong high quality , highly reliable, local off-the-air signals. In order for a system to compete under these conditions, the system must be engineered in such a fashion that it could successfully compete in terms of the same quality, reliability and performance as these off-the-air signals. The preliminary determinants of quality are signal-to-noise ratio, cross modulation and ghosts. You are all familiar with these terms as a result of the industry schools which outline and detail methods of qualitative determination. I am sure that by now you are all familiar with these terms, with their method of determination and know of many ways in which to improve them. A fourth extremely important factor is reliability. A subject which has frequently been ignored both in the past and at the present. My purpose today is to acquaint you with the basics of reliability and to point out to you same methods by which present system reliability can be improved.