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broadcasting football over verizon wireless mobile broadband

S

stephend2

I've been working on a project for a few weeks now to get ball games on the air for a reasonable priceo. we did our first game tonight with the new setup and it worked great. the only problems we noticed was an occasional dropout which it recovered from in less than .5 seconds.

I'm using a verizon wireless usb adapter connected to a cradlepoint router, connected to a barix instreamer 100. I have the barix set for 32khz sampling rate mp3 at quality "2" which is about 64kb/sec.

I just wanted to share something that seems to work pretty good. I know it does not have the error correction that the tieline or comrex units have, but for the cost it can't be beat. I've grown quite fond of the barix 100 boxes both instreamer and exstreamer. currently we are using a pair to bring in a morning show from across town, another pair over the t1 to our fm transmitter to carry audio for the am to a marti stl-8 and an instreamer 100 to encode the online stream for the AM.

I'll report back when i have my road kit assembled and ready for the crew to use, right now I just have the bare encoder and router which I carried out to the ball field and got on the air to test everything out. I'm planning to get a 4u rack case and mount the encoder, router and wireless adapter in the back of it with velcro, then put a rackmount mixer, tc electronic c300, rackmount power strip and sony minidisc player in. the idea being they want to run spots from the field so there is no need to have someone babysit the control room. We're a small station in Vicksburg, MS that is run out of the owner's basement.

we ran spots from a laptop tonight and that worked out quite well. i was particularly impressed when the band played at half time, could actually hear all the instruments fairly well with only a small bit of compression artifacts. much better than anyone else in town, heard another game on another station in town and their phone line was so noisy it wasn't even listenable.

I was not at the studio tonight but I believe the owner recorded the halftime show, if I can get it I'll post it up for download.
 
Yep.
We've also seen good results using an XP PC with Internet Connection Sharing and a crossover cable to feed the Instreamer.
 
I initially tested with a pc tethered to my iphone. verizon has much better service here than att. I went for the router solution for ease of use, just plug it in and it comes up within a minute.
 
Has anyone here tried this with Skype? I'm sure it wouldn't sound as good as with the Barix encoder, but I expect it would beat a cell phone, which is what we're currently using -- and the full-duplex connection would make for simple IFB.
 
Your major drawbacks will be the inconsistency of the VZW connection. Speeds will vary and dwindle due to atmospheric conditions, status of the cell (up/down, which may force you to a more distant cell) and capacity of the cell. Our experience with doing major college football tailgates is that you will start to get knocked offline the more VZW phones that are in use in your location. By about 30 minutes to kickoff, even with our Comrex ACCESS, we lose connectivity a lot.
 
I've worried about how it is going to hold up at various locations. so far so good but we won't really know until the out of town games..

We're mainly going to be doing smaller high school games so probably not going to be much of a problem.
 
DudeFan said:
Your major drawbacks will be the inconsistency of the VZW connection. Speeds will vary and dwindle due to atmospheric conditions, status of the cell (up/down, which may force you to a more distant cell) and capacity of the cell. Our experience with doing major college football tailgates is that you will start to get knocked offline the more VZW phones that are in use in your location. By about 30 minutes to kickoff, even with our Comrex ACCESS, we lose connectivity a lot.
Click to expand...

This is exactly my experience at the Kentucky Derby, and at a concert with 50,000 attendees.

I've been told by Comrex that this should not be the case, and they have suggested that I upgrade my software. Before I actually got to test their theory, one of my lunkheads dropped it on it's USB modem, breaking the USB connector off the circuit board. Fun fun.

When my unit comes back, if it still behaves that way I'm going to start a Comrex Access thread.
 
My Access is overheating and seizing.... after two years. About ready to call them and ask them what they think the issue is.
 
AT&T actually brings a mobile cell site to the stadium parking lot during my college's football games, the stadium capacity is about 55,000 and all seats are sold out. I still had gotten dropped calls last football season.

A few hundred people at a high school game is a piece of cake for any cell tower.
 
greg.hahn said:
I've been told by Comrex that this should not be the case, and they have suggested that I upgrade my software. When my unit comes back, if it still behaves that way I'm going to start a Comrex Access thread.
Click to expand...
Without wanting to hijack this thread with someting offtopic: that would an interesting thread.
We are experiencing something similar...
 
Interesting posts about the Comrex issues with cell traffic. I have been looking for a solution to covering high school games, mainly basketball games where we can't use a Marti since we are indoors, and football/baseball games that are outside of Marti range. Our LPFM can't afford a Comrex at this time, so we drop to analog POTS when we can get it and cell phone (ugh) when we can't.
I have a 3g cell phone and USB cable for tethering, so I thought about trying Skype via laptop, but I would have to figure out how to rig a control connection. We use a Sine DAI-1 to send commands to the studio via DTMF. Maybe run a terminal on the laptop to run scripts on the studio PC.
 
techie2 said:
I have a 3g cell phone and USB cable for tethering, so I thought about trying Skype via laptop, but I would have to figure out how to rig a control connection. We use a Sine DAI-1 to send commands to the studio via DTMF. Maybe run a terminal on the laptop to run scripts on the studio PC.
Click to expand...

If you've got a decent 3G connection, why not use remote access to control the studio computer while you're using Skype on your laptop? Could be problematic if you lost the connection, though.
 
Skype sounds really good now with their new 12khz wideband codec, however the problem I ran into when just testing over the internet (cox cable at both ends) is that without QoS even on a relatively light use connection it skips all over the place. So I would imagine with a 3G link that has high latency and really variable bandwidth that it would probably be worse. I'll be trying the 3G later on verizon to see how that works.
 
Well after a couple games with the new setup.. Works really well for the most part, great at both fields here in Vicksburg. We took it down south of us to a game and the result was not quite so good. We were apparently on a heavily loaded cell site, worked pretty well during the game but pregame and h
alftime was almost unusable with the dropouts. I suppose from everyone at the game hitting up their phones during the breaks in the game and before.

This location is right next to a major university as well and I'm sure that didn't help matters any.

I'm working on adding a talkback channel to the remote kit in the near future which should work pretty well. still going to be around .5 second delay each way though.

our next road game is about 47 miles away, for a backup I'm going to try to take the roadcaster out there along with a 7db yagi and see if we can make it back on that. Receive antenna is at about 320ft and on one of the highest hills in the area.

Something else I'm working on - and I already have it approved at the local school district is getting a network connection in the press box. I can't speak for the out of town schools, but the company I work for during the day has the contract for all IT related stuff at the school district and I know that they have a full DS3 to the internet and a 100mb link from where that is located to every school. I'm thinking if we can hang our encoder off landline connections wherever possible we can eliminate the dropouts completely. I know this works well for a radio show we do from downtown with an instreamer 100 sitting on the hosts cable modem.
 
I found something else that works better than Skype (tests using cellular data sucked btw), and it's the software popular with gamers and such: Ventrilo

Basically you'll need to set up a server, preferably just at the studio, connect the client to this local server and then configure NAT on your router at the studio to forward the Ventrilo port. I would password protect it to keep port scanners out of your private channel, but other than that it works great! For some reason maximum quality is Speex 32khz at about 42kbps rather than 44.1 but it still sounds great and has excellent latency!
 
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