Broadcast RF Bring Channel 4 Coverage To the Winners Enclosure

Vislink customers, Broadcast RF, were at Aintree to bring the new Channel 4 coverage of the biggest horse racing event in this country, The Grand National, to the screen. All eyes were on this as for the first time in over 50 years the event was not broadcast by the BBC.

Broadcast RF are well versed in dealing with these types of events and are now the exclusive RF suppliers to NEP Visions for the Channel 4 horseracing coverage.

The size of the Aintree Racecourse combined with the intention to broaden the amount of background information proved a huge challenge for them, with the Grandstands over 1km away from the far side of the course. This combined with the diverse areas they were required to cover meant that they had to engineer a receive antenna infrastructure to cope with this. They made extensive use of fibre optic cables, a new permanent installation supplemented by a temporary rig, to bring the received signals back to a central control point to feed the receiver/decoders for the 13 radio cameras that were provided.

Broadcast RF used a number of Link wireless camera systems to provided they coverage which included two steadicams, two tracking vehicles (equipped with gyro-stabilised cameras), five roving reporter cameras, one Camcat wirecam, one helicopter camera and a roving super slow motion camera.

This roving super slow motion camera required a special remote control system to allow the VT (EVS) operator to recall the slow motion recorded packages, over the RF link that the camera operator had captured.

Chris Brandrick said We have developed, in house, a Broadcast RF bespoke remote control system to provide the recall control in addition to the usual camera paint functions. The use of the various frequency bands available to broadcasters for radio cameras was carefully managed, and because half of 2.5GHz band was recently lost to 4G cellphone operators, we had to use alternative additional frequency bands to provide all the facilities, increasing the complexity and size of the receiver infrastructure even more.

As for the race itself the big favourite was Seabass, the 2012 winner, but as is sometimes the case with the race it did not go to plan and the 66/1 outsider Auroras Encore came home to win by nine lengths.

Channel 4 were delighted with the event and released viewing figures of 8.9million for its coverage of the race representing 61% share of the television audience.

LINK:	http://www.vislink.com/news/news/newsdetail.php?ID=432...
	See more stories from vislink

Most recent headlines