PHABRIX wows the crowds is year at BVE

PHABRIX wows the crowds this year at BVE PHABRIX was on good form at the UK s principal broadcast show this year s BVE 2015. As one of the UK s leading test and measurement manufacturers, it was good to see a British company developing innovative solutions for the broadcast industry and to hear of their major export success.

Two main product ranges were on display - their very popular PHABRIX Sx portable series and the PHABRIX Rx rack mount range of instruments.

Interestingly PHABRIX had clearly introduced its new Sx portable TAG' for the pro-video market, adding a range of interfaces, analogue, SDI and optical with SFP support. Boldly displaying the £2199 price tag of the TAG, (sorry couldn't resist it), the uptake from the professional broadcast engineer has been a surprise to PHABRIX.

Paul Nicholls, PHABRIX sales and marketing director explained:

We actually developed the Sx TAG thinking it would appeal in those markets requiring a cost effective instrument as they made the transition from analogue through to digital. Clearly mainstream engineers in our developed markets can also see the advantage of a multi interface portable so we've been selling significant numbers of the TAG into our primary European and American markets.'

There are however a couple of factors that may explain the TAG's success. The first was that Harris discontinued its HD star product and the second that PHABRIX has added very sophisticated audio support to the Sx range in general, including support for Dolby E, D and D plus. The Dolby support option is only £450, and for that sort of money, you have a portable device which has everything for testing Dolby in broadcast infrastructures along with 16 channel embedded audio and full AES support. If you add the features up it is quite a steal and clearly canny' broadcast engineers have spotted this.

The PHABRIX SxE continues to find a willing audience. Since its launch this instrument has earned PHABRIX 11 technical awards for its provision of a combined generator, analyzer and monitoring toolset with physical layer analysis. What stands out is the clarity of the eye display along with jitter analysis and the automated measurements to SMPTE standards. The form factor of the Sx instruments in general are perfect for field work. With one hand on the instrument you can squeeze yourself into the back of an OB truck or engineering bay and readily attach cables to the unit without having to find a desk or something stable to prop the instrument up on. In fact the minimal weight of the product allows it to be dangled from the cable while you fiddle about with the equipment under test.

Clearly the other rising star, the PHABRIX Rx rack mount instrument, had developed into an excellent multi-instrument device capable of showing 16 instruments simultaneously from up to 4 individual inputs. The modular capability of the Rx is indeed a positive, the investment can start minimal with one card and be updated in the field. Interestingly PHABRIX had included SFP cage support on each of the modules that can be used in its Rx rack mount chassis. Unsurprisingly optical support has made the Rx a first choice in many installations where fibre is the dominant transfer medium.

What shouts loud and clear about the Rx however is its excellent user interface. So many times an excellent product becomes confused by the operators inability to control it not so the Rx. All the controls are very intuitive and the use of presets and quick builds of customised screens makes every engineer smile in recognition that this product has been designed by broadcast engineers for broadcast engineers. We're not allowed to say which US mainstream station has adopted the Rx for its QC broadcast requirement, but having looked at the instrumentation available on it at BVE let's say you get a lot of product for the price. With its 1920 x 1080 rasteriser output an engineer can see what is happening to the signal be it video or audio all at once. He doesn't have to be sitting with the equipment either, the Rx has a remote control interface available from any standard web browser so you can sit at your desk and control it in the rack within the facility from anywhere on an open network.

PHABRIX had added two major new tools and many more enhancements for the Rx at BVE. The multi frame capture of video with playback of associated instruments to provide a frame by frame view of the video fault captured whether manually or triggered by CRC error very nice. The Loudness capability of the Rx able to monitor four separate channels and the closed caption display across four channels also created quite a stir. The new full Dolby decode module for the Rx in particular pleased most engineers viewing it especially used in conjunction with the new audio down mix feature.

So well done PHABRIX. It's not often you see a very innovative rack mount solution to what has traditionally been a simple quad only display, but this British company has really moved video and audio monitoring ahead with the Rx.

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