HouseRight streamlines RF HOW management with Spectrum Recorder

RF spectrum management is a central element of house of worship AV integrator HouseRight’s implementation of wireless microphone and IEM systems, and as a long-time devotee of RF Venue, HouseRight has long deployed spectrum analysis hardware from the manufacturer to reveal the available clean spectrum in a church’s RF environment.

The first use was for a church having wireless audio issues in a crowded RF environment. The Spectrum Recorder, “was certainly the most effective tool that could be deployed over a given amount of time,” explains James McMullan, design manager for HouseRight. “We were trying to understand the activity of the church and its campus throughout the week, whether the interference was an issue only on Sunday morning, something that's happening all the time or intermittent.”

Spectrum Recorder continuously captures RF activity, saving the data in its internal storage as time-stamped CSV files, which can be retrieved via USB drive or accessed remotely over an IP network via the recorder’s POE network port. HouseRight typically deploys Shure and Sennheiser wireless systems, and Spectrum Recorder’s data files are natively compatible with software like Shure’s Wireless Workbench, Sennheiser’s Wireless System Manager, Audio-Technica’s Wireless Manager, the RF Explorer Pro analyser and RF Venue’s web-based Wireless System Builder tool for system design and frequency coordination worldwide.

With the Spectrum Recorder, there was no longer an issue of the church staff having the technical ability and time availability to commit to scanning throughout a weekend, nor was it necessary to send a HouseRight technician out to perform the monitoring. The Spectrum Recorder can simply be placed in the facility and turned on, and automatically begins capturing spectrum data.

“It has made it easy for the customer to continue doing what they're doing,” said McMullan. “It’s an all-in-one solution to allows us to say, ‘Let’s not have to think about it until we can capture data’. We can just ship it in the mail.”

A church deploying the Spectrum Recorder can set it up in an unobtrusive location within the RF environment with minimal guidance from the integrator. “For a smaller application we’ll just use the provided whip antenna, which makes it essentially drag and drop,” says McMullan. In a more sophisticated deployment, where the church has knowledgeable staff and an RF distribution system, Spectrum Recorder can be connected to their RF distribution for a more refined view of what their remote antennas are seeing.

“We learn what happens on an average week at a site before we go install equipment,” said McMullan, “so that when we are deploying resources, we have historical data. It ends up saving a lot of time and energy onsite. The most expensive component of our projects onsite is our travel.”