With Chicago’s Grant Park as the site of his victory rally, President-elect Barack Obama addressed a crowd of 250,000 on a warm November election night, with the global press corps depending upon wireless technology to help deliver their reports to millions worldwide.
“As you’d expect during a historic moment like this, there were news organizations in attendance ranging from Al Jazeera to NBC, CNN, and C-SPAN,” notes broadcast engineer George Gorzelanczyk, the man given charge of coordinating wireless frequencies for the teeming press pool that descended upon the event.
“And along with the media came every manner of wireless device you can imagine: Cameras, microphones, IFB [interruptible foldback] systems, microwave transmitters, you name it,” he continued. (Note that the president-elect did not use wireless during his speech; instead, he was provided with podium hardwired Shure SM57 microphones mounted in a special presidential “Y” fitting brought to the event by Shure’s Tom Krajecki.)
Gorzelanczyk (a 37-year veteran of remote and special project operations at Chicago’s WGN-TV) devised a frequency map that he felt would work – in theory. To corroborate his ideas, he worked Tom Krajecki and Scott Brumm of Shure, who showed up on-site armed with a plan as well as a pair of racks filled with Shure UHF-R wireless receivers.
Once the receivers were ensconced in a trailer serving as Gorzelanczyk’s command post, the devices were all networked together.