Nikao Church upgrades to RF Venue components
Nikao Church upgrades to RF Venue components
Iowa-based BNY Productions recently designed and installed a full audio, video and lighting system featuring RF Venue wireless system components for Nikao Church’s main campus. Located in the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina, the large facility includes classrooms, offices and an auditorium capable of seating up to 1,250 worshippers.
Nikao Church has a large worship team, with around six or seven singers every week as well as instrumentalists, including two or three keyboardists, guitarists and a drummer. The church required a large IEM count, as well as vocal microphones for singers, the pastor and host mics, online host mics and more. “We ended up deploying 14 Sennheiser ew-500 G4-935 wireless microphone systems and 13 Sennheiser ew-IEM G4 wireless in-ear monitoring systems,” said Ryan Bonfiglio, project manager at BNY. “With any project that uses wireless mics, we always try to include antenna distribution or a combination for optimal deployment in the field. It not only cleans up the racks and installations, but it gives us a known starting point on antenna placement and range.”
BNY deployed RF Venue’s CP Architectural Antenna and COMBINE8 Kit, as well as a second COMBINE8 eight-channel IEM transmitter combiner and a passive 2x1Split splitter/combiner to allow all of the sanctuary’s IEM transmitter RF outputs to be combined to feed a single antenna for transmission to the IEM receivers.
The house of worship has two zones of mics being used on the stage for services, as well as mics in the lobby and outside the front of the church for pre- and post-service programming, which posed a challenge for BNY. To combat this, RF Venue’s Optix Series 3 two-channel RF over fibre optic system was used to convert the electrical antenna outputs to light waves and then back again at the receiving end. Two RF Venue Diversity Architectural Antenna and DISTRO9 HDR Packs were deployed to provide wireless mic signal reception and distribution. An RF Venue inline band-pass filter on each antenna output suppresses RF noise outside of the operating band of the wireless microphones, to improve the signal-to-noise of the antenna signal delivered to the dual-zone, nine-channel DISTRO9 HDR antenna distribution amplifiers. The two DISTRO9s then deliver both the antenna outputs and DC power to the wireless microphone receivers.
“The church loves the ability that they have to freely move around the building and have their team be flexible on where they are placed without restrictions on coverage,” concluded Bonfiglio. “With the band-pass filters in line as well, they get good clean signals from both antennas without adding extraneous noise into the system.”