ATSC Tuner

The ATSC tuner is a device found in televisions made for North America. ATSC stands for Advanced Television Systems Committee, and is the standard generic device your television set uses to receive and tune signals for digital cable TV, using Over The Air (OTA) systems. Over The Air refers to signal transmissions from your local digital cable provider, and differs from the QAM tuner in that the QAM tuner is meant to receive and tune land-line digital cable.

An ATSC tuner must be standard equipment in all North American TV sets and in Taiwan and South Korea; other countries have different standards and devices. In the US the ATSC tuner is mandated by the FCC, and by other telecommunications governing bodies in Canada and other participating countries. It comes integrated with your television, and may also come integrated or as an external device for other electronic media items such as computers, laptops, VCRs, video recorders, and set-top boxes.

It is perhaps more accurate to call it an ATSC receiver, with a tuning function built in. The receiver receives over-the-air television broadcasts from your local TV station, picks up those audio and video signals, and prepares them into a form that can be generated into your television in the form of the audio/video you see onscreen. The ATSC tuner demodulates the signal, allows selective tuning, decompresses the incoming signals, corrects any errors in information-receiving of the signal, performs an analog-to-digital conversion if the signal is from an analog source, synchronizes the audio/video, and performs many more tasks in receiving the signal and 'clearing it up' to send to your screen.

Since the taking-over of digital television, the FCC has very quickly phased in the mandatory inclusion of an ATSC tuner in all TVs. By mid 2005 only the larger televisions (over 36 inches) needed to have the tuner, by early 2006 televisions over 25 inches needed them, and by march of 2007 it was mandated that every new television must have one.