Wisycom braves the jungle for I’m A Celeb
Published: ASIA
AUSTRALIA: A comprehensive RF wireless system from Wysicom was recently deployed into the wilds of Australia for the filming of the UK version of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here. The system was chosen and supplied by UK-based Wysicom partner, Raycom.
To facilitate the filming of the television show, a total of 40 LNNA active antennas were positioned around the ‘jungle’ of the show’s name, coupled with a number of MAT288 programmable RF matrix combiners to cover ‘over five million square feet of jungle’. The solution is described as one of the largest of its kind.
‘A system this large required extreme care to make sure the gain structure was correct to maintain the dynamic range throughout the system,’ explained Pyers Easton, managing director of Raycom. ‘This ensured the system was free from overload and did not introduce noise. The system also had a high degree of redundancy.’
DC power was provided for active antennas, along with voltage and current measurement. For other non-permanent locations, another pair of antennas fed back to the studio using a Wisycom BX1 – Fiberbox ‘plug-and-play’ RF over fibre system. The entire solution was broadband and unfiltered, and the antennas covered from 470 to 870MHz. With 5W walkie talkies on 515MHz that could potentially be in close proximity to the antennas, the large signal handling of the amplifiers was critical, as any overload could cause serious loss of signal. In the finished system the combined noise floor was -112dBm with no overload, even when levels were up to 20dBm with a walkie talkie right under an antenna.
Hardwire runs between matrix combiners and antennas also had to be considered. Some of the feeders were up to 500m long, so Wisycom BAW amplifiers were deployed at appropriate points, providing gain range from 0 to 22dB.