Cue light for radios

[MikeJ]

No, Radios are not Cheap to buy, but rental from Road Radios and others is actually very reasonable. Your situation sound pretty manageable given the scope of your description. There are some cheap radios that are better than FRS. Boafeng makes 400-500mhz range radios that are actually not bad. I wouldn't put them in to service full time, but for occasional use the come in hand.

And to the original poster, there are radio to clearcom adapters. you could use use clear com to communicate to those with radios, but I think It uses the signal(strobe beep) in the clear com to press the transmit button, so you can easily tie up radio communication if using clear-com a lot. This also does not help you at all if you don't already use clearcom.

 

[Mwchris]

I recently wrapped a show in a 140 seat theater and while they have a wireless ClearCom it was only four seats, didn't work real well, and it ATE batteries. Each unit took 6 AA batteries so we would have burned 24 batteries per show. I ended up using free software called Mumble than ran in the background of my Mac running Qlab and hooked up a decent wireless access point To create our own communication network. Then the folks that needed comms downloaded the free smartphone app and used the headset of their choosing. My one access point covered our woke three story building and worked great. Mumble is full duplex can be voice activated or set to push to talk. It also has a built in text messaging / chat that worked great for the sound guy. I should mention that you can run the software with Internet access, but I chose not to as I want my folks to be paying attention to the show.

I know this doesn't work for festival situations, but if you have a venue with existing wi-fi it could be deployed pretty easily. Mumble can be hosted on a Mac or Windows device, there are Andriod, iOS, Mac, and PC client Apps.

With the number of cheap tablets and smart phones out there it is easy to find enough devices. They don't gave to be new, just need to get on the wi-fi network and download the apps.

You can also host the server it via the Internet yourself or from a provider and have multiple site connections, or have folks connect using their data provider on a mobile device for a very low cost.

I've used my own hosted server with an internal wi-fi and have less than 6 milliseconds delay with no issues for multiple shows now.

If anyone wants to know more let me know.