Talkback on OBs.

[Brian Gaff]

A number of years ago, this seemed to be going digital, but listening to the
Derby meeting this year, its all analogue again, as UHF links are very
numerous. I get the impression that there were two issues with digital,
merely from listening to some of the back chat that Digital at least last
time they used them, are poor gritty sounding quality, have the tendency to
drop out suddenly, a bit like mobile phones and have a delay which makes
hearing yourself into a challenge of not sounding drunk.
Obviously a case of attempting to get off the shelf tech to work in a
situation where instant comms and no drop outs is very important. You can
hear when analogue is getting a bit scratchy but digital just gives up.
Brian

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[John Williamson]

Analogue has a reasonably graceful failure mode as the signal gets
worse, it is true, but digital can be checked more easily and under most
marginal conditions, it is more robust. (I use both analogue and digital
radio microphones on stage.) Some digital receivers have a way to check
the signal error rates so you can predict a problem.

Another point is that you either get as perfect as possible an output or
nothing, so you get fewer complaints from listeners...

On 20/06/2022 09:12, Brian Gaff wrote:
> A number of years ago, this seemed to be going digital, but listening to the
> Derby meeting this year, its all analogue again, as UHF links are very
> numerous. I get the impression that there were two issues with digital,
> merely from listening to some of the back chat that Digital at least last
> time they used them, are poor gritty sounding quality, have the tendency to
> drop out suddenly, a bit like mobile phones and have a delay which makes
> hearing yourself into a challenge of not sounding drunk.
> Obviously a case of attempting to get off the shelf tech to work in a
> situation where instant comms and no drop outs is very important. You can
> hear when analogue is getting a bit scratchy but digital just gives up.
> Brian
>


--

Tciao for Now!

John.

[Brian Gaff]

Remember this is nbfm where the control room scanner and some remote
cameras and the like talk to wandering presenters etc, so none of it goes to
air its mostly where is whathisname or somebody relaying the colours fof a
stable to the announcer or countdowns or which camera will be used or
warnings to a camera that something is not looking right. Lots of banter as
well of course.
Wimbledon tennis is the next nearby event.

Brian

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"John Williamson" <johnwil...@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:jhbbej...@mid.individual.net...

[SimonM]

On 22/06/2022 09:38, Brian Gaff wrote:
> Remember this is nbfm where the control room scanner and some remote
> cameras and the like talk to wandering presenters etc, so none of it goes to
> air its mostly where is whathisname or somebody relaying the colours fof a
> stable to the announcer or countdowns or which camera will be used or
> warnings to a camera that something is not looking right. Lots of banter as
> well of course.
> Wimbledon tennis is the next nearby event.
> Brian
>

There's always the unforeseen.

I remember doing a live OB from a car ferry, where
the scanner was three decks down, and the analogue
PTB was useless in places. We resorted to cans
from cameras for some of it. Where it was usable,
you couldn't reply to production.

We got by, but I think digital comms would have
been worse, because you could hear the analogue
signal degrading, so you had warning of total
failure. Squelch doesn't help, as PTB is
continuously on TX from the van.

On another occasion, this time radio, presenters
were given off-air radios for a cue feed, but the
delay introduced by the Nicam feed to the
transmitters had been forgotten (leading to
apparent drunkenness, as suggested above).

What surprises me, given that satellite links are
ubiquitous nowadays,especially in 'difficult'
locations (such as war zones), you don't get any
feeling that handovers are rehearsed, nor cue
lines exchanged and memorized. I understand you
can't avoid delays in live interviews, but you can
in a straight handover. All the remote end needs
is the cue sentence and a key word for timing,
similarly the out words from the remote, and
everything looks very neat and tidy.

I know coverage is possible from amazingly
difficult places nowadays, but it still seems a
bit unnecessarily messy.

[MB]

On 16/07/2022 08:49, SimonM wrote:
> On another occasion, this time radio, presenters
> were given off-air radios for a cue feed, but the
> delay introduced by the Nicam feed to the
> transmitters had been forgotten (leading to
> apparent drunkenness, as suggested above).

Some years ago as the police moved to Airwave, I was told that the
firearms units were not happy with it because of the delay. If they are
told to fire, everyone needs to get the command at the same time. I
don't know what eventually happened though.

[Woody]

The delay with Airwave (Tetra) is establishment of the link path. Once
that is in place whilst there may be some slight differences between
radios in their speech decoding (just like DAB is between two different
radios even of the same make and model) it's at most a few tens of
milliseconds which can be ignored.

[Woody]

Has anyone noticed how poor lip-sync has become more and more evident.
It has done it since day one on GBN, but I even noticed it with Huw
Edwards on the 10 last night in the studio!

[tony sayer]

In article <tatrc3$3b3vk$1...@dont-email.me>, MB <M...@nospam.net> scribeth
thus

May be delays thru the system but wouldn't all the men on the ground get
the Fire command at the same time? after all surely there are receiving
the same base station?.

And i though they had a direct back to back facility?..
--
Tony Sayer


Man is least himself when he talks in his own person.

Give him a keyboard, and he will reveal himself.

[MB]

On 16/07/2022 13:02, tony sayer wrote:
> May be delays thru the system but wouldn't all the men on the ground get
> the Fire command at the same time? after all surely there are receiving
> the same base station?.
>
> And i though they had a direct back to back facility?..

Don't know, just going by what a well connected friend told me.

I don't know much about TETRA, does it broadcast a datastream or
establish a connection with every terminal (AIRWAVE-speak for radios I
believe).

There were comments at the time of one big meetings of heads of state
(in Scotland?) that they had to tell people to turn their radios off
because a bus load of plod, all with their radios on would cause a lot
more traffic than the system could handle which suggests it was not
"broadcasting" the data stream and linking to every set. Though some of
the problem was said to be some of the plod (particularly senior ones)
still have their own forces' channels running on the sets.