In a normal
NTSC video signal, there are 525 "lines" of video signal. These are split into two half-images, known as "fields", sent every 60th of a second. These images merge on-screen, and in-eye, to form a single frame of video updated every 30th of a second. Each line of each field takes 63.5 μs to send; 50.3 μs of video and 13.2 μs amount of "dead time" on each end used to signal the television that the line is complete, known as the
horizontal blanking interval (HBI). When the scanning process reaches the end of the screen it returns to the top during the
vertical blanking interval (VBI), which, like the HBI requires some "dead time" to properly frame the signal on the screen. In this case the dead time is represented by unused lines of the picture signal, normally the top 22 lines of the frame. NABTS encodes data into the video signal as a series of dots at a fixed rate of 5.7272 Mbit/s. Each line of a field has 50.3 μs of video area that can be used for transmission, which results in 288 bits per line, or 36 bytes. In NABTS, three bytes are used for hardware synchronization, another three for the packet address, two for sequencing information, leaving 28 for data and redundant forward error correction (FEC) information. In theory, the NABTS codes can be used on any of the 262 lines of the display, allowing up to 262 x 28 = 7,336 bytes of data per frame. Typically, however, the data is instead placed only in the unused lines of the vertical framing area. Lines 1–9 are used for vertical synchronization, line 21 is used for
closed captioning, and everything after 22 is the television picture. That leaves 10 lines, lines 10 to 20, that are useful for sending data. At 60 fields per second, those 10 lines at 288 bits each encode a total of 172,800 bit/s, although 20% of that is needed for signaling purposes, so rates of 115,200 for end-user data are more typical. Applications requiring less throughput can simply use fewer lines. == Services using NABTS ==