London-based events and touring company Patchwork Events delivered a live ‘gig in the sky’ in Cappadocia, Turkey, with hot air balloons providing the ‘stage’ for DJ Bedouin and accommodating the audience.
The brief was to provide high-quality live audio to 18 hot air balloons, which took off from a single location – one acting as the stage while 17 guest balloons received high-quality, live audio from the broadcasting balloon.
The project brought a number of challenges, such as how to transmit high-quality audio over such a large distance without latency. Hot air balloons are almost entirely reliant on the wind to move across the landscape and therefore, altitude was the only real control available for the project. With this in mind, coverage for broadcast needed to be capable of transmitting over a very large area.
One frequently-encountered difficulty when transmitting long distances at ground level is buildings or landscape limiting line-of-sight between the transmitting antennae and receivers. Positioning the transmitter in a hot-air balloon several hundred feet in the air takes this out of the equation, making sufficient transmission power to reach the receivers in the other hot-air balloons the primary obstacle.
The main challenges were how to rig the equipment and power the equipment quickly so that the team on the ground could focus on getting the balloons up in the air without any delays from the audio team. The crew co-ordinated the take of all the balloons, which were pre-rigged with battery packs and speakers and all 18 balloons were in flight within 16 minutes.
‘Following our own research and communications with RF specialists, we chose to work with the microphone and wireless equipment manufacturer, Shure, for their industry standard rock-solid wireless equipment,’ says Patchwork Sound Engineer and Audio Production engineer, Steve White. ‘The equipment worked flawlessly and with in-depth logistics and planning, we were able to deliver a party in the sky over a 2km radius. We were very happy with the results which far surpassed our original expectations.’
Following advisory sessions with Shure, Patchwork set up ground test equipment comprising a Shure PSM1000 transmitter operating at 10mW power output (10dBm) in conjunction with a +18dBm booster. The decision was made to use a Shure UA860SWB omnidirectional dipole reception pattern antenna to cover the widest possible area from one transmitter.
To co-ordinate the take-off, the hot air balloons needed to be meticulously timed to set one off after the other, 18 balloons were successfully launched within just 16 minutes.
‘Right from the initial conversation the Patchwork team were open to ideas and testing the solution we proposed,’ says Stuart Stephens, Shure Product Marketing Manager for Pro Audio. ‘I think there may still have been some doubts that we would be able to cover an operating area of up to 2km, but I knew that PSM1000 would be up to the task. From previous experience and testing, I knew that PSM1000 could be paired with a 1W UHF power amplifier that would provide a much wider operating range than the standard RF power outputs. Shure also has an accessory that allows users to convert the smaller quarter-wave antennas on the PSM1000 receivers to a larger BNC connector, allowing them to remotely-mount larger antennas. This small accessory was key in allowing Patchwork to use the UA860SWB omnidirectional antennas on both the P10T transmitter, and the P10R+ receivers.
More: www.shure.com
