A transmission system for digital terrestrial television broadcasting has been designed. This system is based on the European cable system but uses stronger error correction and better equalization. The stronger error correction is a concatenation of Reed Solomon coding RS [204,188,17] and convolutional coding with R/sub conv/=1/2, 2/3, 3/4, 5/6 and 7/8. The algorithm which is used for convolutional decoding is the Viterbi algorithm. To provide the Viterbi decoder with soft decision information, every symbol bit will be expanded with two soft decision (reliability) bits. The modulation scheme of the terrestrial transmission system is 64-QAM square root raised cosine filtered with a roll off factor /spl alpha/=0.15. The mapping of the symbols into the 64-QAM constellation is a Gray-mapping over the complete I,Q-plane. In this paper the performances of the terrestrial transmission system are simulated and analyzed.