February 12th, 2008
What The Freq?
Posted by Church Video Ideas under Audio, Churches, Communication, Consulting, Intros and Announcements, Media ministry, Products, Random Thoughts, SoftwareI don’t know what it’s like at your church, but at mine, we (my Audio Coordinator and myself) are constantly having to battle with frequency coordination throughout our campus. I’ve said from day one - I’ve never seen a church with so many wireless mics. Every classroom, every venue, you name it - it’s got wireless mics. This isn’t by choice - I inherited this.
Since our campus is under reconstruction, we had to move the children’s ministry from the Children’s Building over to the Education Building. When we did that, the kids’ ministry brought over their mics from their building, but they clashed with the existing mics in the E-building and canceled each other out. It has become a huge project to coordinate our campus (this involves my team, several different types of software, a scanner we just purchased, Clark ProMedia and a professional frequency coordinator from Florida who scanned our entire campus for all RF activity).
Across the street from us is a small church called Prestonwood (a church of over 20,000). People come to visit Bent Tree and everyone says, “Wow - Prestonwood is literally across the street.” Each time I say, “Yep, there it is.” We had to talk with their engineering team (yes, they have an Engineering Department) and coordinate our frequencies with each other. They had 3 professional RF guys on site when I called and were working on the same thing.
Yesterday, we learned that the 10 wireless mics we had set aside for our new kids’ theater won’t work after January ‘09, due to the ongoing bidding of wireless bands. Are you guys keeping up with all this? It’s huge and the Church doesn’t even have a voice in the decision - it’s all about money and churches can’t compete with what these companies are bidding. My Audio Coordinator talked with Shure yesterday and their guy told him to not even bother with writing letters - money talks, plain and simple.
Take a look HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE for more info if this is news to you. If you are keeping up with this, I’d love to hear your thoughts, observations, plans, ideas, etc. When we ordered our new microphone package for our new worship center, I ordered a wired mic for every wireless mic. I wanted to make sure we could do everything we do - just in case. FYI - All of our new wireless mics in our new worship center are Shure UHF-Rs. How are you future-proofing your church?
February 12th, 2008 at 7:34 am
We’re building our new facility entirely out of lead, and we’re going to use x-ray wirelesses. That’ll do it!
February 12th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I have been on a crusade about wireless for several years. Warning churches about the up coming FCC sell off. You have until Feb. 2009 to get things OUT of the 700Mhz range. I have yet to understand why some people thought they could get the FCC to change its mind as they are set to get about 15 billion dollars from this sale. Yes, money talks.
Here is the part that churches need to pay attention to, any current devices in that range will be illegal to use after Feb. ‘09. It will be like having an unlicensed radio station. While you may not, at first, have interference issues, you should stop using them simply because its the law. I suspect that it will take very little time in the large metro areas for these frequencies to get used up. If nothing else it will force churches to get out.
My suggestion at this point is that you go TODAY and tell those in your leadership that all your current wireless systems that are in the 700Mhz range must be replaced before Feb. ‘09. Make a plan, tell them how much it will cost and start setting aside money. I am a recent hire at my church so we are behind. I am currently working on a plan for our church and like Greg, we have so many wireless systems its going to cost a fortune.
February 12th, 2008 at 10:54 am
we just stay small enough that we only need 2 wireless mics
one wireless lapel/headset microphone for our pastor
&
one handheld for special announcements
oh and then there’s that wireless in ear system our worship leader uses - but otherwise we stay pretty wired.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:11 pm
What happened to the good old days when you built a sanctuary to carry someones voice from the front to the back and they didn’t need mics? Heck, they didn’t even have mics.
I’ve got a solution… paper cups and string.
Seriously, this is a bit of a problem that isn’t really in the sight of a lot of churches. This blog post is the first I remember reading that relates the wireless spectrum auction to the church.
February 12th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
luckily we’ve steered pretty clear. The new stuff will actually open some holes for us once the analog stuff moves out everything gets rearranged. We’re mostly Sennheiser house (My boss before me and my current boss are both Sennheiser guys) … We’ve already talked about that we’re going to have to go shopping spree in 09. Luckily theres a perspective renovation for our Worship in the next 2 years or so. I’m a Shure guy so I’m pushing for UHF-R stuff. It’s sweet stuff.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:46 pm
Does anyone know how/if this applies to Canada?
February 13th, 2008 at 7:42 am
I unfortunately get to feel the pain of the FCC actions twice; being involved in public safety communications and church sound. The FCC sold public resources (air waves) to the highest bidder (Nextel) to relieve themselves of actually having to do their job. So now Nextel takes a huge section of frequencies that were designated for public safety communications. This means that every public safety agency in the nation must reband or replace their radios whether they have Nextel interference in their area or not. This is a huge expense that Nextel is trying to avoid paying for of course. The negotiations of what Nextel will replace and what labor they will pay for has been near impossible venture. The FCC to appease the public safety communication has decided that they will clear much of the 700Mhz range to help with the aforementioned issues. The FCC has also dictated that all television stations move to a full digital broadcast by 2009, well at one point is was supposed to be 2006. This was actually good news for us using wireless microphone systems in that range because the digital signal being broadcast gave us more “white space” in which to operate. Unfortunately the air waves are getting really crowed as everyone wants everything wireless so manufacturers of wireless gear of every kind are also salivating over these white spaces. Churches of course will have no voice in this concern but may find ourselves allied with the entertainment industry which also uses the same microphone systems that we do. The FCC has pretty much caused a domino effect in the frequency allocation world. I believe that most churches that are not in large metropolitan areas will be unaffected but for those of who are we may find our frequency choices cut back significantly. All we can do is pray.
February 15th, 2008 at 7:32 am
Wow! It’s good to see I have company with my woes. Several years ago our Music Minister started with one wireless Shure (which we still have and still works-amazing for being over twenty years old). Since then he has picked up whatever was on sale. We have EV’s, Shure’s, a Samson, and mostly AT’s. The problem we are having is when the weather is bad (low cloud cieling), we pick up harmonic skip from the McClennan County Sherrif’s dispatch system. On any typical day this is not a problem, but it affects the EV’s and AT’s badly and they make up the lion’s share of our wireless system. In fact, recently we had one of these situations pop up and basically shut down the use of our wireless system due to repairs to the Shures and the Samson. I did a little research looking for a system in the middle price range with freq’s that would be out of the Sheriff’s department dispatch range. I had been looking at AKG’s for some personal stuff that I do and with a $500 difference between them and the Shure UP, our tech guys decided to give them a try. Amazing what a difference these mics make. Very clean sound, with some great features. They operate in the upper 700Mhz to lower 800 Mhz range, so hopefully we will not have a problem with the freq re-allocation. If you are looking for great mics on tight budget, check these mics out.
February 15th, 2008 at 8:42 am
Although we’re small, we’ve avoided this problem by upgrading our wireless systems. Being in telecommunications, I’ve seen this problem coming for a while. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much planning from the federal level to deal with the legacy users of unlicensed gear. The dollars in the auction are huge so it will be painful for churches, community theaters, schools, colleges or anyone else that may be using legacy wireless gear.
One other thing to be aware of is the increasing presence of HDTV channels populating the 600Mhz space.
Although we have several brands in use, I like the Sennheiser products a good bit. If you haven’t used it, Sennheiser has a frequency availability locater on their web site:
http://www.sennheiserusa.com/FrequencyFinder/
It’s worth a look if you’re buying and tuning new gear.
February 15th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
Having just arrived at my current church a few months ago, I’m only now getting a handle on what impact this will have for us. Currently, we have 8 channels of Shure UHF that needs to be replaced ($12,000+) and 6 channels of PSM700 ($9,000+). So yeah, it’s a huge issue for us. I was hoping for a new speaker rig next year, but that $21K will cut deeply into that budget.
I suggest we do what corporate America does when they have to do something they don’t want to pay for; belly up to the trough. The auction of the 700Mhz band could fetch up to $30 Billion (!) according to some. Since those are public dollars, we the public should get a little back to offset our costs. I’m sure the FCC will be amenable…right?
As the saying goes, “A guy can dream!”
February 18th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
[…] FYI - There has been some great discussion and comments on the frequency post, as well as the team leadership post. Go back and check them out. As far as the “Firing a Volunteer” post, I’ve been thinking about the whole refining of a team (this applies to any team at your church, not just the tech team). […]
February 18th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
Since I took the tech director job over 3.5 years ago, I’ve known about this issue. So we stopped buying wireless mics in that range. OK I bought 1 Senn G2 ENG kit that’s in the 700 but that was my first purchase.
We have 46 wireless mics on our campus (We can have as many as 6 services going on at the same time) plus classrooms. We have 16 wireless mics in the 700-800 range. 6 of those mics are some very old Sony’s that we’ve gotten our money out of.
Our sanctuary is set for the most part. The only mic in that range is our pastor’s lapel but we have others we can move him to. I’m going to be hard pressed to fit 46 mics in the frequency range. We’re in the DFW are too, Plano actually just down the road from ya. So we have lots of TV stations
Because of the layout of our buildings we have a lot of RF bleed over from 1 room to the next. I’m going to see if I can get enough separation to create 2 or 3 RF zones. So we might be having some conversations of who gets wireless and who gets wired mics.
March 6th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
There is some great updated info on this at Shure’s website.
http://www.shure.com