Multimedia company Dutchview was faced with the big challenge of covering a 12,500 square metre area with both video and audio recording equipment to follow the Utopia inhabitants. In order to provide coverage to this vast area with an RF wireless solution, they turned to Sennheiser Benelux for assistance.
Since the start of Utopia on 6 January, the people of the Netherlands have been watching in droves to discover whether the 15 inhabitants will manage to create the life of their dreams - or whether their ambitious project will turn into a nightmare.
What looks so effortless now on the screen required a lot of careful planning and dedicated work by the Dutchview team. Peter Slot, Dutchview project manager, explains, "We have a lot of experience in reality formats but the challenge of covering 1.25 hectare in an open field surrounded by a lot of trees was completely new! We ended up installing more than 100 HD remote cameras on site. We had to mount them upside down to get a good viewing angle but this also meant that we needed to give them a new housing as rain could get into the cameras now. We also devised a modified remote control for the cameras to enable us to get the pictures we need."
Capturing the audio was an equally big challenge, "Not only would the sheer size of the area make RF coverage difficult but we also had to take into account that humidity and the changing weather conditions in general would affect the RF. We therefore contacted our partner Sennheiser Benelux for advice."
Vincent Tilgenkamp, Sennheiser Benelux's RF specialist, got involved. He and his team visited the site to carry out detailed measurements and check optimum antenna positions for capturing the wireless audio. He noted, "Never before has such a large area for a reality format been covered by radio mics, and we had to come up with a few special solutions to do the trick."
The 1.25 ha Utopia location accommodates two spacious hangars for housing, a stable for cows and hens, grazing ground and some agricultural land - plus woods in between. To capture the conversations of the 15 inhabitants, they would have to be miked with bodypack transmitters and clip-on mics.
After the on-site visit, Vincent Tilgenkamp and his team were already able to rule out some options: "Dutchview had planned a fibre distribution network for the cameras, and we briefly thought about distributing the RF signals via fibre optic cables too but then discarded this idea. The distances involved were at maximum 335m from antenna to microphone receiver, and we calculated that a coaxial distribution would result in a better performance."
The team opted for a single rack of receivers - and eight antenna distribution combiners custom-built for Utopia. A master distribution combiner pair was installed with the microphone receivers, and was fed the antenna signals from six local distribution combiners - three diversity sets - accommodated in Utopia's main areas.
(Jim Evans)
