Introduction

In recent years, the impetus to future-proof homes has motivated the building industry to add structured wiring to new homes all across the country.  Typically these new structured wired homes have at least two category 5 (cat5) cables and two RG6 coaxial cables run from various rooms in the house to a central location.  In most cases these wires are unused except for the RG6 that distributes the cable or antenna TV signals to various rooms from a central location and usually the cat5 cable is used to distribute telephone signals to various rooms.  Audio-visual entertainment has become an integral part of life and living, especially since the advent of DSS or other satellite video systems and DVD players or DVD ROM in personal computers.  One way to bring the entertainment to every room in the home is to have a satellite receiver or a DVD player in every room.  This is not a very practical solution since from one satellite antenna typically only two receivers can be connected.  More antennas, more receivers and more monthly subscription for the same service would be required to have DSS receivers in every room.  In reality only one or two channels may be displayed in the house at any given time.  A similar situation arises with having a DVD player in every room, but chasing the DVD disc around the house can be a nightmare.  Keeping the remote control from getting lost is also a real challenge in most households.

In the old days, when VCRs were the only source of audio-visual entertainment, it was easy to take the video and audio signals from the VCR, modulate them on an unused UHF TV or cable channel and send them to all the rooms in the house.  This yielded an average broadcast TV quality signal to all the rooms.  Channel modulating the video and audio signals from a DVD or DSS destroys the resolution and fidelity of the signals.  It reduces the quality of these high performance and high resolution signals to that of television signals in early 1960s.  Also, remote control becomes a problem because IR signals do not travel through walls in the home.  For decades, installers have used injectors, combiners, filters, modulators, attenuators, amplifiers, splitters, isolators, hum eliminators, etc. to distribute modulated video signals and remote control around the home on RG6 cables!  Despite all the efforts by the experts, the signal quality is diminished.  A novel approach that eliminates the need for channel modulators and other archaic paraphernalia yet maintains the same high signal quality to all the rooms from a DVD or DSS is described in the following section.  Other benefits of this technical advancement include easy IR remote signal distribution and integration with local sources such as VCR, video games and WebTV appliances.

Design overview

The rapid growth in data communications and networking industry over the last two decades has led to the availability of very high performance and inexpensive category 5 twisted pair cables.  The phenomenal growth and development in the semiconductors and integrated circuit technology has yielded very powerful audio and video signal processing circuits.  These advances in technologies have culminated in the design of CATS^TM (Complete Audio/Video Transmission System) based on a proprietary and patent pending BDSP^TM technology for distribution of high quality audio/video signals over category 5 unshielded twisted pair cables.

Figure 1