Honestly, unless you really really have the need for a Tempest
system, the
Telex BTR-800's are still the better
system to go with. The Tempst
system looks nice and flashy, and works really well if you need to
cover super huge areas because you can use the Tempest Antenna's over Cat5e. The biggest downfall with the Tempest is the
system latency (50ms from
Beltpack to
Base Station (or from Wired Com to Wireless Com), which is 100ms from
beltpack to
beltpack wireless). They have some fancy magic in the beltpacks to cut down on echo because of the insane amount of
latency, but it's still not very good and I wouldn't use it unless you had the need for super huge area coverage and Tempest became the right tool for the job.
Don't think of intercom lines as "accepting" as in one-way communication. It is bi-directional and the
system is one giant loop with subsequent loops off of it to beltpacks and any one failure can inject back into the entire
system. (Ex: you have a 2
channel system with 10 beltpacks, all wired. It is working just fine today, but you come in and someone complains that the entire B
channel is making noise. You find that there is a
beltpack submerged under water and is creating the noise. The moment you unplug it your
system is back to normal. Everything affects everything in com, there is no one way directionality). Look on the back of the Tempest and it has two
XLR ports, simply run your
channel A and
Channel B lines from your mainstation into the Tempest. Done.
Effective range is right in the
manual or found with a quick google search. Again, the benefit to the Tempest is its extreme area coverage.
Stock Tempest gets 500-900 feet
stock with the half-whip and up to 7,500ft. with the
line extenders over
Cat5. That's manufacturer straight from the datasheet, not sure what you can expect in your particular application as I'm sure they quoted statistics in a large open room with some good
bounce to it and not in a theater with corners and crevices and and basements,
etc.