3G Experience with Comrex Access

[speakerman]

Anybody have experiences to share using the Access on 3G? Verizon, Sprint or ATT. Signal coverage and bandwidth reliability reports would be helpful. I'm interested in the reliability of the various CODECs for both voice-only and stereo-feed remotes.

Thank you

 

[ontario1940]

I have a sprint card and used it on battery mobile and it worked fine...there was about a second delay, but it was at a bicycle race with thousands of people around

 

[DudeFan]

Your mileage will vary according to location, cell, cell capacity, and even your log-in connection. In our experience, the Access is fully capable of handling almost every condition seamlessly. However, if you are in an area with heavy usage and therefore slow or erratic data throughput, you will get audio dropouts that sound like a mic cable going bad. For football tailgates, we have the hardest time beginning 30 minuted before the game, where the carrier will knock us off from the cell repeatedly in an attempt to maximize the call volume. Luckily the Access reconnects quickly.

 

[chrish]

Had identical problems Dudefan experienced, did a very involved St Patricks day remote from the canyons of the financial district in downtown Boston. Used a
Sprint card where one would expect wirless internet would be pretty intrenched
and had lots of dropouts
In general a great unit but there a few bugs that need to be worked out.

 

[speakerman]

A further question for the thread. Can you believe the coverage maps published by the providers or do you need to do your own coverage checks? It would appear from the maps Verizon has the best coverage in the area I'm looking at.

 

[boiseengineer]

If it's a REALLY important remote we have a laptop with AT&T 3G, share that connection to the Access. Also have the Sprints 3G card in the Access. If one goes down, the Access will pause for 20 seconds then connect using the other card. If all else fails a cell phone can be plugged in to give us cell-phone quality.

 

[Navig8or]

Radio remotes using wireless is a great idea, but just not quite ready for prime-time. I know a couple small market stations who swear by their Comrex & Tieline boxes. I'm in a large metroploitan area, and have not found the Comrex/Tieline reliable enough to use as my primary service at any important live event; backup or pre-recorded cut-ins OK (sometimes). We always carry four cards (AT&T, Sprint, Verizon & the wi-fi card). At a recent major event (co-sponsored by a wireless broadband provider), the connection was so iffy that we ended up pre-recording all program elements onto my laptop & e-mailing them back to the station. For our sports coverage, the predicted reliability is still so inconsistent that we order ISDN, DSL or POTS. As for the wireless providers' published coverage maps, I'd suggest using it simply as a guide; I wouldn't bet my remote on it. We've attempted to use the Comrex in areas shaded as solid coverage areas only to have a very poor connection, yet find pretty decent coverage in an unshaded area. I always suggest testing the Comrex under real broadcast conditions if possible, and same time of day if possible (Just because it was solid at 2pm on Wednesday doesn't mean it'll work at 4pm on Friday when all the commuters fire up their broadband cell phones on the way home). And we're still at the mercy of the wireless provider. If you can get access to hardwired broadband or a POTS line, you should be in great shape with great quality.

 

[jammerdave]

Although we are using the Tieline products, I have some advice.
When we first bought the Tieline gear, they had suggested that we use Verizon. We did that, but soon found that it just wasn't reliable enough. Problems were traced to far too much latency in the Verizon backbone. (They had been promoting the heck out of the V-Cast stuff) I had at the time just recently been at an SBE meeting where Sprint was showing off their new "Rev A" data. I got them to let me have some demo gear, and it worked out great for us. The gear consisted of a Rev A laptop data card & a special router (linksys or netgear, can't remember). We just used a network cable from the router to the Tieline. Worked out great, and is easy to do for our promotions folks. I think we pay a $59.95/month fee for unlimited data. Very pleased. If you have Sprint Rev A available, I would recommend it.

 

[gunterm]

On ebay there is a cellgear guy selling external antennas for aircards, those built in ones on there just won't cut it for high bandwidth data that the Comrex would need. Only about $40 and should solve the problems.

 

[speakerman]

The antennas look interesting. Most of them look beneficial however they might also be good at skewering ballistic basketball players as they hurdle themselves into the spectator sideline area. Football would be ok as you are usually in a safe press-box. Anybody tried these or other variants?

The main concern for trying to use 3G is the low signal levels one usually gets at court-side of a basketball game. I would imagine most outside remotes would work fine as long as you are within a cell.

I recently installed CorePlayer http://www.coreplayer.com/ on my Treo 650 to play streaming radio station feeds. I only have basic old Sprint unlimited data that clocks out at 85kbs and I have been able to get all feeds I have tried to play reliably for an extended period of time. I'm going to visit a few basketball sites and see what kind of coverage it will hold. I would think you could get a reliable feed as long as you don't get crazy on bandwidth, put up with some latency and can get a reasonable signal to work with.

 

[techie2]

The antennas look interesting. Most of them look beneficial however they might also be good at skewering ballistic basketball players as they hurdle themselves into the spectator sideline area. Football would be ok as you are usually in a safe press-box. Anybody tried these or other variants?

The main concern for trying to use 3G is the low signal levels one usually gets at court-side of a basketball game. I would imagine most outside remotes would work fine as long as you are within a cell.

You bring up a good point about antennas and courtside tables. I've done enough high school games now to have had a few players crash into the table, basketballs bounced off my Zercom, etc. Usually if I am somewhere where I can use a radio for an off-air monitor, I try to put it under the table so the antenna isn't sticking up.

We have no budget for Comrex type equipment at this time, so our "home" gym is wired with a Marti antenna hookup and POTS jack, and when on the road we use a POTS line if we can get it (even by stringing phone cable off a spool into coaches offices if needed) or cell phone if we can't. We have a couple sites that are RF "black holes" that I use an external high-gain cell antenna attached to the phone to get a little help. One of them actually installed a cellular signal repeater system to get better coverage inside the facility for public events. However, there are some gyms that I look at the 1 bar on the phone display and pray the call holds for the length of the game.

It sounds like the 3G idea is great but I'd have to do some signal tests (maybe if I can find someone with a laptop aircard) to know if it would work at some of these venues. I also would have to see how badly the cells in those areas are affected by peak call traffic. With the average game tipping at 7:30 PM, I would think that would at least get us past the rush hour call traffic.