Russian outside broadcast company ANO Sports Broadcasting has commissioned two new trucks as part of its build-up to coverage of the Sochi Winter Olympics in February 2014. The trucks, built in Germany by Broadcast Solutions, are 3Gb/s ready and rely on infrastructure and monitoring products from Axon Digital Design. The first vehicle is designed primarily as a master control room, to work in association with other trucks from ANO’s fleet. It includes five separate areas for feed and line control, technical supervision, servers, audio and a technical area. The second vehicle is primarily a support vehicle carrying a flight-cased eight camera production unit, but it carries a 2.4 metre uplink so is fitted with permanent signal routing, processing and monitoring equipment. Equipment from the Axon Synapse range installed in the new trucks include up, down and cross converters. One critical requirement was to support 16 channel audio for multiple languages in Olympics coverage. The installation also included quad split modules which can be used iteratively, allowing as many as 160 picture feeds to be shown on a bank of 10 large monitors. “Our customer, ANO Sports Broadcasting, is a highly ambitious broadcast service provider with a great vision of the future,” commented Stefan Breder, CEO at Broadcast Solutions. “To match their vision we needed technology partners that share this vision and Axon is such a company. Already, Synapse is found in many of the ANO Sports Broadcasting OB vehicles and it meets all of their requirements for advanced broadcast glue.”
