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GNU Radio comes with receivers for ATSC and DVB-T. You'll need an SDR that can provide 6 MHz (ATSC) or 8 MHz (DVB-T) of bandwidth (which an RTL-SDR cannot do).

DVB-T2 and ATSC 3.0 receivers are too difficult and nothing exists for them.

Here's a screenshot where I'm transmitting to myself (GNU Radio also has an ATSC transmitter).

https://www.w6rz.net/atscdemo.png

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> (which an RTL-SDR cannot do)

Is that true? RTL-SDR are derived from a chip designed for DVB-T tuners.

Maximum sample rate is 3.2 MS/s.

https://www.rtl-sdr.com/about-rtl-sdr/

To be clear I’m not doubting you, but how does this square with the fact that these are literal DVS-B tuners? Do they perform some decoding in hardware for this purpose?

The key is that the general-purpose SDR mode is an originally-undocumented test/debug mode. Different drivers are used to access it; the standard DVB-T drivers don't provide access to it.

The output of the dongle in it's normal DVB-T mode is an MPEG-2 Transport Stream. The maximum bitrate of DVB-T is 31.67 Mbps or ~4 Mbytes/s. It's thought that the USB interface was designed to support that rate and not a whole lot more (3.2 MS/s would be 6.4 Mbytes/s since it's 2 bytes per sample).

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