The recently opened 1,250-capacity auditorium at Nikao Church in Charlotte, NC has been equipped with new wireless systems in a project that saw production house BNY Productions team up with RF Venue to deploy numerous components to help deliver reliable RF service.
The church added a 40-acre main campus on the city’s southern outskirts that includes classrooms, offices, and the auditorium. “The basic structures and buildings for the south campus were there; however, they needed to do a full AVL system for the church in order hold services – this was a ground-up installation,” explains Ryan “Fig” Bonfiglio, project manager for the Sioux City, IA-based company. “BNY has been using RF Venue for pretty much anything that employs wireless. It’s not that we don’t trust the wireless system manufacturer; we just really like the quality of what RF Venue provides and knowing that we’re going to have consistent performance every time.”
The church has a large worship team, with six to seven singers every week plus instrumentalists that include two or three keyboardists, guitarists, and a drummer. Bonfiglio continues, “They had a large IEM count need as well as vocal mic needs with all the singers and then pastor and host mics, online host mics, etc. We ended up deploying 14 Sennheiser ew-500 G4-935 wireless microphone systems and 13 Sennheiser ew-IEM G4 wireless in-ear monitoring systems.
“With any project that uses wireless mics, we always try to include antenna distribution or combination for optimal deployment in the field. It not only cleans up the racks and installations, but it gives us a known starting point on antenna placement and range.”
A CP Architectural Antenna and COMBINE8 Kit plus a second COMBINE8 8-channel IEM transmitter combiner and a passive 2x1Split splitter/combiner allow all of the church’s in-ear monitor transmitter RF outputs to be combined to feed a single antenna for transmission to the IEM receivers. As a bonus, says Bonfiglio, as it folds the performance of the RF Venue circularly-polarized CP Beam Antenna into an unobtrusive low-profile housing, the CP Architectural Antenna “provides a clean install look that matches the wall color.”
BNY had the challenge of having two zones of mics being used on the stage for the service while also having mics in the lobby and outside the front of the church for pre- and post-service programming. The lobby/entrance area being too far from the microphone receiver racks to run coaxial cabling without unacceptable signal attenuation, an Optix Series 3 two-channel RF over fiber optic system was used to convert the electrical antenna outputs to light waves and then back again at the receiving end (the optical signal can be run for miles without degradation).
In addition, two RF Venue Diversity Architectural Antennas and DISTRO9 HDR Packs were deployed to provide wireless mic signal reception and distribution. Each Diversity Architectural Antenna provides the proprietary cross-polarized, true diversity reception of the company’s Diversity Fin Antenna in a compact housing with the same appearance as the CP Architectural Antenna.
Further, an RF Venue inline band-pass filter on each antenna output suppresses RF noise outside of the operating band of the wireless microphones to improve the signal-to-noise of the antenna signal delivered to the dual-zone, 9-channel DISTRO9 HDR antenna distribution amplifiers. The two DISTRO9s then deliver both the antenna outputs and DC power to the wireless microphone receivers.
“The church loves the ability that they have to freely move around the building and have their team be flexible on where they are placed without restrictions on coverage,” Bonfiglio concludes. “With the band-pass filters in line as well, they get good clean signals from both antennas without adding extraneous noise into the system.”
