Termination Resistors on DSP cards

It is absolutely imperative that the first and the last DSP cards of your MediaMatrix system have termination resistor SIP packs installed on these DSP cards! It is also critical that ONLY the first and last DSP card have these termination resistor packs installed, and no other DSP cards between them! These should be on both far ends of the DAB cable.

The DAB cable that plugs across the top of the DSP card passes extremely high speed digital signals. In essence, it is an RF (radio frequency) transmission line! In order to work properly, it must be terminated at both ends. Failure to terminate both ends will result in a host of different problems.

It would be impossible to list all of the different problems that this could cause. An example would be crosstalk on the DABS which can cause problems that would vary with individual view file designs. In all of these cases, no hardware failure indicator will show, which can make trouble shooting this problem extremely difficult.

It is important whenever you replace a defective DSP card, that you first check to see if the two resistor packs are installed. Normally, all cards ARE shipped with these installed, and they MUST be removed prior to installation of the DSP cards. If you add DSP cards to your system, you must remove the resistor pack from what was the last card in the system (prior to adding additional cards), and you must be sure that the new "last" card in the system HAS the resistor packs installed.