Newcastle Casino, a 112,000-square-foot facility in Newcastle, OK that sprawls across four large buildings connected by hallways, has been outfitted with a range of antenna and signal distribution tools from RF Venue deployed by integrator AVL Systems Design to bolster the performance of wireless microphone systems utilized to make a range of venue-wide announcements.
“Wireless microphones are a great way to keep patrons engaged and aware of all of the promotions the casino runs, but the size and the layout of the buildings were causing dropouts to the audio,” sayss Steve Covey, director of bid estimation & project management for AVL Systems Design. “They needed a way to assure that the audio would be seamless as someone walked a microphone from one end of the complex to the other, a distance of several thousand feet and with different ceiling heights in each building.”
Design input on the project was provided by Don Boomer, senior applications engineer at RF Venue, who helped Covey choose the right mix of products for the project. For starters, the North/Northeast building’s high ceilings are served by CX22TM ceiling antennas, with 17 units installed. Meanwhile, the Central building, where the tops of some of the gaming machines almost touch the ceiling and where the main IDF closet is also located, five wall-mount Diversity Fin antennas (four black and one white, to match their locations’ color aesthetic) and one CX22 antenna help assure signal propagation throughout the space.
Further, the distances between and within buildings are addressed using a pair of Optix Series 3 RF-over-fiber-optic (RFoF) conversion transmitters and receivers, a remote antenna extension system that eliminates the need for coaxial cable runs between the North and South buildings and the IDF closet in the Central building. With the Optix Series 3, runs of up to 10,000 meters are possible with virtually lossless transmission over 1310-nm single-mode fiber cable.
“The Optix system was able to take the RF signal over the longest distance we had to run on this project – over 1,000 feet from the South Building to the Central Building – with zero latency issues,” says Covey. “Without the Optix system, it would have required a huge amount of cabling and amplifiers to boost the signal along to way to overcome cable loss.”
All of these RF signals are then routed to one of five 4 ZONE active antenna combiners that combine up to four separate pairs of diversity antenna connections. From there, the signals are routed to a DISTRO4 four-way active antenna splitter plus cascade port that can share one pair of Diversity antennas with up to four wireless receivers — in this case, Shure QLXD wireless receivers for the casino’s two Shure SM58 wireless handheld microphones. And, four In-Line RF amplifiers are installed in the North building, designed to compensate for signal loss on the longer coax cable runs needed there.
“RF Venue had everything needed to accomplish what this project needed,” concludes Covey. “The casino managers were very happy with the outcome, which is clear sound and zero dropouts anywhere in the casino.”
