Live From the 2025 Ryder Cup: NEP Specialty Capture's President Dan Grainge on Taking 5G to New Heights

Live From the 2025 Ryder Cup: NEP Specialty Capture's President Dan Grainge on Taking 5G to New HeightsT-Mobile private 5G nodes will be transmission backbone for wireless camera feedsBy Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director

Friday, September 26, 2025 - 6:00 am

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In the days ahead of a big-time event like the Ryder Cup, the compound is a busy place, with not only the broadcasters but also clients, guests, and, of course, tech-facility providers onsite making sure everything is working well. For many such events, NEP Specialty Capture group, led by President Dan Grainge, is onsite in force. Making the Ryder Cup more exciting than usual, the NEP team will be using T-Mobile private 5G nodes as the transmission backbone for wireless camera signals. Grainge sat down with SVG ahead of the event to discuss the Ryder Cup, the future of 5G, and why it's important.

NEP Specialty Capture's Dan Grainge is onsite at the 2025 Ryder Cup with his team, breaking new ground in using 5G for a professional sports event.

We'll talk about the 5G effort in a bit, but tell us about the overall presence NEP Specialty Cameras has here at the Ryder Cup?

We have a full range of specialty camera solutions for a major broadcast event this size. Our specialty cameras are, across the board, 20 robos with long lenses and pan bars on most tee boxes. We also have some specialty high-speed cameras as well and three dirt cameras. So it is a more typical golf setup with around 60 cameras.

The RF side, however, is as big as The Masters production, with upwards of 40 RF paths, and we can handle many of them at the same time. I would consider this one of the largest events that would happen in a year, including the Super Bowl, because it is truly international event.

From the outside looking in, that wouldn't seem to be the case because, for most of the event, there are only four groups of golfers on the course at a time.

Well, they still play most of the holes, and, while a typical PGA TOUR event may have only one or two featured groups [and that level of coverage], here all of them are featured groups. You just can't have any weaknesses around the course, and that means more infrastructure, like receive sites. So our total camera count between robos and RF is around 80.

And the robotic cameras are controlled from the compound?

Yes, we have a robo facility where operators control them and also monitor the lock-off cameras and reframe cameras on the par-3 holes.

Let's talk about the big news here: the use of 5G in a big way. T-Mobile is providing a private 5G network used for the T-Mobile Breakfast at Bethpage show, a live drone, and more. Where do you guys fit in with that project?

We are very proud of how this has developed and the innovations involved. When we introduced our 5G MT-UHD MiniTx [which has a built-in 5G transmitter] three years ago it won all kinds of awards, but it didn't have the resources and 5G connectivity on sites to be used. So we had the infrastructure ready to support 5G, and now we're finally using it for about five or six live cameras with paint control, audio, sync, and more. We have done a lot of testing, and it's working quite well. And T-Mobile has been a great partner helping support bringing more tools to the broadcast production so our customers can deliver an incredible viewing experience.

T-Mobile is providing the 5G connectivity. How will you be making use of its 5G nodes?

One of the neat things that happens at this event is the crowd running to the first tee box in the morning, and that will happen during the T-Mobile Breakfast at Bethpage show [which is on at 6-8 a.m. ET on Friday and Saturday and at 8-10 a.m. on Sunday]. We will be using 5G from T-Mobile for that, and we've also tested it with a Steadicam.

Tell us about the 5G infrastructure.

We have 15 5G receive sites. The trick is to get the camera to switch between sites without dropouts and without a glitch. That's our secret sauce: using a certain wavelength and switching between the nodes without a dropout. Over months of testing, we were able to find out which wavelengths and frequencies work better for that handoff.

Everyone is familiar with how smooth that handoff is on cellphones, especially for voice calls, but why is this more difficult?

On a phone, you can send a packet, and, if a packet drops out, it doesn't matter. Here, if a packet drops out, you get a glitch, and then it has to re-sync, which means it might not come up for a frame. But the leap forward here is, we aren't seeing any dropouts, sync issues, or audio-sync issues. But there is constant tweaking and learning about how 5G signals work.

It's a private 5G network, but there is still interference. For example, when other cellular service providers turn on their services earlier this week it caused some crosstalk as there is some bleeding between the networks. It's just physics, and we're literally tweaking specific wavelengths to get all of this to work cohesively.

What other leaps have you been able to make while testing and getting ready for this?

There are some other 5G-related products that can have multiple cameras and in those systems one of the cameras is the primary and the others are subs. And you need to switch them in order to make a sub camera the primary camera. But we have a system here where all the cameras are primaries, which means all of them are available instantly.

Why is the ability to use 5G for broadcast cameras important?

The RF spectrum is going away and we and the rest of the industry need to prepare for that. All of the things we've done in a singular location have worked. It's fairly straightforward, and it's fairly easy. But it is not just set-up-and-go like RF is. Eventually, we may have

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