by Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director, SVG News
When the TCS New York City Marathon once again takes over the streets of New York’s five boroughs on Sunday, a couple of technical advances, increased reliance on IP and bonded-cellular technologies, and the use of a smart car promise to transform coverage.
NEP’s ND5, Atlantic, Arctic, and ESU units are on hand, and HD 21 from CP Communications is onsite to support the largest wireless-video effort the company has taken on for the New York City Marathon. Six regular motorcycles, three lead trucks, two cameras on wheelchairs, a smart car, and a seventh motorcycle for performance data via SMT will be used to cover the action from the course. The two wheelchair cameras are built by Inertia Unlimited and rely only on bonded cellular for transmission.
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That coverage and the vehicles are taking a leap forward this year. A smaller smart car is replacing one of the standard-size lead vehicles, and, if all goes well, all four of the lead vehicles next year could be smart cars.
According to CP Communications SVP Kurt Heitman, the smart car has a 3.5-GHz transmitter with comms being sent via IP. “This is the first time we’ve done all of the comms with IP,” he notes. “Every rooftop and receive site is IP back to [our compound in Central Park]. The bigger challenge here is not frequencies but IP addresses, as we have gone from worrying about RF to worrying about hundreds of IP addresses. We spend weeks mapping out IP addresses to ensure there are no conflicts.”
The move to IP means that three IP racks with Haivision IP encoders are replacing ENG vans and providing bidirectional audio, video, and communications. One each is in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and on First Avenue and at 123rd Street in Manhattan.
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