NMT’s HDTX tackles signal management issues
Story Highlights
By Ken Kerschbaumer
National Mobile Television is now offering a new self-contained transmission and signal management system that is only six-foot tall but offers gigantic improvements in signal routing and processing.
Known as HDTX, NMT says the six-foot tall unit is one of the most powerful self-contained transmission and signal management infrastructures in the country.
The system is designed to provide large-scale routing and signal processing in a tight, transportable package. NMT says it is completely standalone and designed to work with multiple production environments simultaneously.
The goal is to give remote operations the type of routing capability typically only found in fixed facilities. The system features a Thomson Concerto 128×128 HD router as its core systems and was created to help ESPN’s 720p HD production of the Winter X Games in Aspen, CO. The powerful transmission center proved to be a seamless answer to the popular winter sports program and NMT worked closely with ESPN technical managers to deliver important customizations for the project. All told it handled more than 20 hours of live Winter X Games coverage, distributing signals to various edit, logging and finishing stations throughout the compound.
In addition to the massive routing capabilities, HDTX offers clients configurable up, down and cross conversion via a heavy compliment of AJA DA’s and Harris X75HD signal processors. In addition the system can handle nearly 100 channels of AES audio embedding and dis-embedding.
The package would not be complete without a custom bench designed to seat two signal managers. The bench is tethered to the routing system and allows for client customized display of signals via a pair of 42-inch LCD flat panel displays. The look and feel of the displays is controlled by two Miranda multi-viewer systems that can be sized and arranged per client request.
The package can also deliver more than 20 channels of modulated RF, including an HD channel that can be tuned on any display with a QAM receiver. To tackle far-reaching signal delivery and movement NMT also offers more than 40 channels of fiber conversion via three Stratos frames that are pre-wired in the package. They can easily be modified to adjust signal flow and NMT can provide fiber cabling solutions to meet distance demands.
