RF Extreme Brands Offer Products To Take on Any Challenge

By Caroline Braff

RF Extreme — Vitec Group’s newly reconfigured parent company encompassing RF Central, Nucomm, and Microwave Service Co. — is well-versed in providing complete solutions, but far more enticing to the company is a project that provides a challenge. At the 2009 NAB Show, the RF Extreme companies aimed to do just that, offering a range of products to solve any wireless-broadcast puzzle.

“We love the challenging, interesting projects,” says Keith Blaisdell, VP, product management, for the Vitec Group. “We’re great at providing a product that’s an out-of-the-box solution, but, when people have individual needs, they come to us, and we really enjoy systems engineering and looking at ways to solve those challenges.”

At the premium end of the Vitec Group’s challenge-solving product offering is Nucomm’s CamPac2 HD/SD COFDM microwave transmitter. The durable transmitter offers high-quality MPEG-2 compression, but most important for the sports market, Blaisdell says, it offers down to one-frame delay.

“As you get involved in compression, the delay is something that’s inherent to some point,” he explains. “However, in sports, you want as minimal delay as possible, especially if you’re taking a wireless transmitter and intercutting with a wired camera.”

The CamPac 2 can be mounted to professional cameras via Anton/Bauer batteries or integrated battery-adapter plates for standard IDX.

Also on display at the NAB Show is RF Central’s RMR-X6-II-D six-way COFDM diversity receiver.

“The point in diversity reception — and we’re a leader in diversity reception — is that we take a technology called maximum radio combining,” Blaisdell says. “At any given time, you have a six-antenna array, where each antenna has a 90-degree view. When that guy is walking around on the sideline with that omnidirectional antenna on a transmitter, at least two antennas are seeing the signal, maybe even all six. We not only take one best signal, we take the combination and put them together. So you can have three antennas with a poor signal, and we can make one good signal out of that.”

The receiver also features on-screen display of stream data, Ethernet monitoring for remote control access, and IP encapsulation for Internet broadcast.