Transmission and receive infrastructure from Vislink, in conjunction with Broadcast RF, was used to deliver course-wide coverage of this year’s Open Golf Championship at
St Andrews.
Broadcast RF designed a compact, lightweight one-man camera transmitter for use at the Open Championship, which included Vislink’s L1700 wireless microwave transmitter and Omni antenna. Limited spectrum availability required Broadcast RF to devise a frequency plan that allowed for maximum coverage, while retaining a portion of the available RF band to share with news broadcasters and commentators. Vislink said that its technology was chosen for its video compression and efficiency benefits, making it possible to transmit seamless HD video from the field.
The receive sites, which were chosen to ensure maximum signal integrity, included Vislink’s L3025 Down Converter. The lightweight units were used to feed the received signals back to the TV compound, using Broadcast RF’s bespoke RF-over-fibre extension systems.
Careful planning allowed Broadcast RF to minimise the number of fibre cores required, ensuring uninterrupted coverage. Engineers mapped the GPS positions of cameras in real time, enabling them to switch the appropriate receive antennas into the receiver/decoder for each camera, based on which camera would provide the best coverage at any given time.
Ali Zarkesh, Vislink’s VP of product management, said, “Vislink’s complete end-to-end solution gave Broadcast RF a platform to deliver seamless video. Our systems offered the flexibility to build a completely customised transmission and receive infrastructure to ensure uninterrupted coverage along the entire course, from opening drive to final putt.”
