Hi,
I manage the sound for a church that meets in central London. We've been having some problems with RF dropout on our mics. It seems to affect all 7 of our Shure SLX systems a little, but the Shure SLX bodypack in particular.
So this is our setup:
- 2 Shure UA874 active aerials placed at the back of the auditorium (about 12m from the stage) with an uninterrupted line of sight to the mics.
- The aerials are set to -6dB because this appeared to produce less drop-out on the hand-helds than when they were set to 0dB.
- We have 6 wireless SM58s and 1 wireless body pack with, obviously 7 receivers next to the aerials.
- There is a coaxial cable run of about 2m from the aerials to a Shure antennae distribution unit. That sends the signal out into 3 units and then the forth output goes to another distro unit which does the same thing to another 4 receivers, so 7 in total.
- The frequencies were coordinated using Wireless Workbench 6 beta and have been changed several times.
- We have 7 Sennheiser IEM units which are usually turned off when the body pack is in use. There is no other known source of RF nearby. (But it's central London so there could be loads of RF around.)
I've tried moving the receivers closer to the stage, changing the frequencies, changing the gain settings on the aerials, but nothing seems to get rid of the problem. We used to have passive aerials and adding the actives and dropping the gain by 6dB has helped improve reception, but has not elliminiated the problem. In particular this seems to affect the body pack a lot more than the other receivers, although I'm not sure why. The body pack is used with a Countryman E6 headset mic. Apparently Countryman are optimised to work with Shure gear, so there shouldn't be any problems with that.
Any ideas as to what I should try to resolve this? Help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Ben
I manage the sound for a church that meets in central London. We've been having some problems with RF dropout on our mics. It seems to affect all 7 of our Shure SLX systems a little, but the Shure SLX bodypack in particular.
So this is our setup:
- 2 Shure UA874 active aerials placed at the back of the auditorium (about 12m from the stage) with an uninterrupted line of sight to the mics.
- The aerials are set to -6dB because this appeared to produce less drop-out on the hand-helds than when they were set to 0dB.
- We have 6 wireless SM58s and 1 wireless body pack with, obviously 7 receivers next to the aerials.
- There is a coaxial cable run of about 2m from the aerials to a Shure antennae distribution unit. That sends the signal out into 3 units and then the forth output goes to another distro unit which does the same thing to another 4 receivers, so 7 in total.
- The frequencies were coordinated using Wireless Workbench 6 beta and have been changed several times.
- We have 7 Sennheiser IEM units which are usually turned off when the body pack is in use. There is no other known source of RF nearby. (But it's central London so there could be loads of RF around.)
I've tried moving the receivers closer to the stage, changing the frequencies, changing the gain settings on the aerials, but nothing seems to get rid of the problem. We used to have passive aerials and adding the actives and dropping the gain by 6dB has helped improve reception, but has not elliminiated the problem. In particular this seems to affect the body pack a lot more than the other receivers, although I'm not sure why. The body pack is used with a Countryman E6 headset mic. Apparently Countryman are optimised to work with Shure gear, so there shouldn't be any problems with that.
Any ideas as to what I should try to resolve this? Help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Ben