Signal To Noise Podcast
The Signal to Noise podcast features conversations with people from all corners of the live sound industry, from FOH and monitor engineers, tour managers, Broadway sound designers, broadcast mixers, system engineers, and more.
Signal To Noise Podcast
284. The “Hows & Whys” Of RF Coordination
Picking up where they left off in Episode 282, Sean and Andy dig deeper into the “hows and whys” of wireless system frequency coordination, addressing issues such as whether it’s ever OK to just scan on the receiver, an overview of the differences between the Shure Wireless Workbench and SoundBase Coord platforms, the reasons why it’s always a good idea to do your own frequency scan with an analyzer, which inexpensive analyzers you can trust (and which you can’t — and why!), and more. This episode is sponsored by Allen & Heath and RCF.
Be sure to register for Live Sound Nashville on March 11, where you can check out the annual Live Sound International Loudspeaker Demo, hear talks by Jim Yakabuski, Sawyer Dickenson, Wayne Pauley, and much more! Use code “SAVE10” at https://livesound.regfox.com/live-sound-nashville to take $10 off the already low $30 registration!
Episode Links:
Signal to Noise, Episode 282: Focus on Monitoring
Pete Erskine’s “RF Coordination for Roadies” (PDF)
Shure Video: What is Intermodulation?
Shure — All About Wireless: Intermodulation Distortion
Video: Basics of Resolution Bandwidth and Video Bandwidth in a Spectrum Analyzer
Practical Show Tech Videos:
Intro to RF Coordination Using SoundBase
RF Coordination Using SoundBase, Part 2
SoundBase Offline RF Coordination Features, Part 3
WWB RF Coordination Process for a Made-Up Mega Convention Show
IAS RF Coordination Process for a Made-Up Mega Convention Show
Lunch with Pete: A Show RF Coordination Process
Episode 284 Transcript
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The Signal To Noise Podcast on ProSoundWeb is co-hosted by pro audio veterans Andy Leviss and Sean Walker.
Signal To Noise, Episode 284: The “Hows & Whys” Of RF Coordination
Note: This is an automatically generated transcript, so there might be mistakes--if you have any notes or feedback on it, please send them to us at signal2noise@prosoundweb.com so we can improve the transcripts for those who use them!
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Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green
Andy Leviss: Hey, welcome to another episode of Signal Noise. I'm your host, Andy Leviss, and with me as always, the Allen to my Heath, Mr. Sean Walker. What's up, Sean?
Sean Walker: What's up, buddy? How are you today?
Andy Leviss: I'm good. You know, gotta get some sponsor love in the
Sean Walker: Uh, all
Andy Leviss: once in a while.
Sean Walker: like it. I like it.
Andy Leviss: Uh, dude, how you been doing?
Sean Walker: Great, dude. I'm great. I'm, uh, thankful to have been home with the family after NAMM for a while, and I don't have to fly out for a few more weeks. That'll be nice to be at home and just work on my own business rather than, you know, chat about everybody else's
Andy Leviss: Yeah, have you managed to stay free of NAMMthrax
Sean Walker: I have. I have. I, I managed to not get sick at all, other than, you know, just feet are tired, because, holy moly, that was a lot of walking.
Andy Leviss: Yeah, I don't
Sean Walker: I'm all good now.
Andy Leviss: Yeah, I don't know if I was technically an NAMMthrax because it hit me so soon that, like, I'm like, I couldn't have gotten something there, but I've definitely been, like, hoarse and, and dry and nasty
Sean Walker: No, you were, you were kind of not feeling well when you showed up, so
Andy Leviss: Yeah, it was, it was that first night, like, I thought it was just from, like, shouting over the pool party, but who knows.
Um, but yeah, this is we, so we were getting together, uh, it's funny cause anytime we sit down without a guest, I feel like, I feel like the substitute teacher rolling the TV cart in
Sean Walker: Yeah,
Andy Leviss: that said, this is, this is something we promised to do a couple episodes ago and then we kind of had to slip that NAMM update in there and working on some other stuff, but, uh, you would, you would, uh, had, uh, thrown me right under the bus of let's, let's dig a little deeper into RF, so,
Sean Walker: Yeah, beep beep!
Andy Leviss: so yeah, I figured we'd, we'd do the thing and, and, um, You can ask me some questions and I'll, I'll try and give mostly correct answers.
And
Sean Walker: All right, cool.
Andy Leviss: so I know we were talking before we started, we said like, first of all, go back. And if you haven't listened to the episode, we didn't like I am tips a couple of weeks ago. Sorry. Um, start there. Cause we talked to the second half of that episode. We dug a little bit into like, Distribution and combiners and splitters and where to put antennas.
So to, to not really be the substitute teacher, just like, you know, redo an info. I'm not going to, we're not going to go back too much into that today. Cause we just did that one or two episodes ago.
Sean Walker: Yeah, short answer was get it.
Andy Leviss: yeah, yeah. Watch where you put your antennas. Um, split them when you can, combine them when you can, don't farm antennas.
Sean Walker: Well, that's the episode.
Andy Leviss: And if you do farm antennas,
Sean Walker: No.
Andy Leviss: you do farm antennas, organic farm, wait, no, that's, um, but yeah, we'd sort of like kind of hand wave towards like coordination and like picking frequencies and that sort of stuff. And that seemed a good thing to kind of tease apart a little bit for this episode. And then we'll, we'll dig in and bring some other, some other experts in to like, talk about, you know, like we want to talk about some of the software and stuff like that.
But finding frequencies seems like a good solid spot to start.
Sean Walker: Totally, dude. So when are we like, as a group or community or, you know, as engineers, when are we okay to just scan on the on the rack and sync our packs or handhelds or whatever? And when do we need to start? Deploying software and working on a proper coordination, like in channel count, like is that one, two, three, four, you know what I mean?
Like where, where are you at in
Andy Leviss: as, as with so many things, the true answer is it depends. The ideal answer is always do a scan, always crunch the numbers. That said, if you've got like one channel of wireless, you're not going to have to worry about any inner mods. So you can scan and see what's open. And as long as you know that there's not other things in like the room next door, you know, with a thin wall that are going to fire on and bite you later, you're probably fine.
Even up to like one or two microphones, I wouldn't be comfortable doing a scan on a receiver more than two, and let me explain why. So, generally speaking, and again, to a degree, the scans on receivers are kind of a black box. None of us, unless we work for the company that made the firmware for that receiver, know exactly what it's doing in there.
But the safe assumption, particularly on lower end ones, is it is literally just looking for I'm gonna scan till I find a frequency that I'm not getting hits on, and I'm gonna take it. So, there's one of the big mistakes with multiple channels that I see people do that I shouldn't have to say this out loud, but I'm gonna say it out loud.
If you are scanning for more than one receiver, After you scan number one, leave it on when you scan for number two, and leave them both on when you scan number three. If you, I
Sean Walker: Why are you talking weird, Leviss?
Andy Leviss: I have seen people scan for one, then turn it off and scan for the next, and then they turn them on and they're all either right on top of each other or interfering with each other.
That's not going to help, but the thing is, so, all of what we're going to talk about this episode, at least as far as coordination goes, comes down to Interference and what's known as inner mod or inner modulation, which like, do you know at all? Like, do you want to try and explain it? Or should I just dive into the nerds
Sean Walker: Keep going, nerds. I'm, I'm, I mean, I know what it is, but you're going to have a better explanation than I
Andy Leviss: cool. So slow me down if I, if I gloss over, like if I need to kind of re explain stuff, but
Sean Walker: My eyes already glossed over, does that count?
Andy Leviss: I mean, look, what are you doing here on time? So. Any, any of you who took physics class, like way back when, we're not going to get too deep into it, but you'll remember like, same thing with sound waves, like we talked about, like, like phasing between two microphones on a drum, the two waves, as they interfere.
You know, they'll cancel at parts, and they'll sum at parts. Same thing happens with radio waves. But, with radio waves, because of the, because of, like, the frequency stuff is happening, and, and, it, it is not only that you get interference and cancellation from the signal you want, but you can also get, basically, ghost signals happening.
And again, I apologize to the people who have, like, deep, ultra nerdy understanding of these things. I'm gonna simplify the explanation a little bit for the sake of a short podcast. But, basically, if I have Two transmitters on based on math of how those frequencies add and subtract to each other. I'm going to end up with another of like, interference frequencies between them could fall into somewhere that I have another receiver happening, like it'll be a certain number above and below.
And you can go online and I can link to a link to an article in the show notes that explains the math. If you want to understand better how it happens for all intents and purposes, what we need to know now is that you have two or more transmitters on at the same time in the same space, they're going to interfere to create.
other frequencies through the two signals modulating together, intermodulation, or we tend to call it intermod because that's already a long enough word. So, whole idea when we're coordinating frequencies, picking frequencies, is we want to make sure we're avoiding those because whether we've got an actual transmitter on or one of those like quote unquote ghost frequencies on either one can interfere with the next transmitter I put on.
So generally speaking, we're assuming that the receivers doing scans aren't doing that math inside because they don't know what else is on. They don't know what else is a wireless mic, what's a TV channel, whatever. They're just looking for clear space and then taking it. One or two microphones, you can get away with that.
Once you get into more, shit gets a lot more complicated because suddenly there's, if I've got 10 microphones, I've got, you know, 30 something intermod frequencies to worry about. So part of the reason I say we're not going to dive into the math of it is because you don't want to dive into the, you don't even want to make an Excel spreadsheet to do it.
People used to do it back in the day. There is software that does this for you. That is way better than we are.
Sean Walker: I mean, Workbench is free, bro, and so is the
Andy Leviss: And, and
Sean Walker: what was the other one? SoundBase.
Andy Leviss: soundbase. Yeah. The basic version. So. Yeah, all the manufacturers have some sort of software that works with at least their microphones and in ears. Sennheiser has WSM, Lectrosonics has, I want to say it's RF Designer, Shure has Wireless Workbench, and then as we've talked on the show before, SoundBase has CoWord.
Two versions of CoWord. The basic version is online only web based. It's free. It's fucking fantastic. They've got a pro version that adds some other features, including offline, that right now is an annual subscription. Also fantastic if you need it, but the free version does so, so much. I would recommend if you're starting new in RF coordination, just learn that and be done with it.
Sean Walker: Totally. Yeah, like don't, don't confuse yourself trying to start with Workbench and then go to Chord. Because that was a whole That was a mind mindset shift for me to,
Andy Leviss: yeah, so if, if you're fully within the Shure ecosystem, all your in ears, all your mics, everything are all Shure, Workbench works great to a degree until you're getting into like really, really jam packed events when it can get a little tricky. If you're using other brands, a lot of them have profiles in Wireless Workbench, so for a while, it was the best solution there was that didn't cost 800 bucks, which would have been I.
S., because it had most of them in. You can also build your own if you have the information, although the stu you need, you need things like the spacing that transmitters require based on what filters they have in them and stuff to figure out. How to place them together and make sure they're not going to interfere with each other.
SoundBase has that all built in for basically every brand. You can also build custom ones if you've got something obscure that's not in there. They also, if you dig into like the pro layers of it, there's profiles for older stuff that like wasn't common enough for them to build it into their default profiles.
But they also have, all of the ones that used to be built into is built in there. Those come with some compromises, uh, versus the basic, uh, defaults that are built in. So basically don't use 'em unless you need to and you know what you're doing. 'cause the idea being that ias, which was. Uh, uh, PWS Pro Wireless Systems previous like industry standard RF coordination program.
The profiles in there were what the guys who wrote IAS and like some of the other folks they worked with, they're, I know I can get away with this and I know what it will do, and this will let me squeeze the most frequencies out of stuff. They don't always. Follow the manufacturer guidance. SoundBase on the other hand, their default presets all hue exactly to what the manufacturer says they need for spacing.
So, you're taking a little bit of risk if you don't know what you're looking at if you switch over to the IS profiles. But they're there for people who need them. I'm sorry folks, bear with me, that Nanthrax has me dried out so you're gonna hear me sipping through the episode.
Sean Walker: Yeaaahh, buddy!
Andy Leviss: Um, so yeah, that's, that's getting a little bit ahead of it.
But the idea is, you, you want some sort of software to do this once you've got more than a few channels. If you're mixing brands, particularly sound based, CoWord is going to make your life a lot easier. Um, let's talk about what the programs do, and then I can get a little bit into the difference between Wireless Workbench and CoWord that Sean was talking about before.
Which, cause they, they take, they're doing the same math, but they're doing it sort of from opposite directions. Which really fucks with people's head if you've been used to workbench and switched to cohort. And there's a way in cohort to work that way, sort of, we'll get there. But the idea in either one is it's going to crunch all the numbers and it's going to try and find you enough frequencies that will all play nice together.
So once you're doing more than a couple channels, it'll You want the computer to help. Let the computer do what it's good at. Math is what a computer is really good at.
Sean Walker: They're like giant calculators. Just let it
Andy Leviss: much. Yeah, with a little paperclip with an attitude in the corner.
Sean Walker: Yeaaaahh.
Andy Leviss: Did I just really make myself feel old?
Sean Walker: 100 percent dude. 100
Andy Leviss: I mean, you got it, so.
Sean Walker: I mean, I'm old as balls, bro. Come on. Ha, ha, ha, ha,
Andy Leviss: Uh, you know, I saw a meme recently where somebody actually looked at, like, when balls evolved, so they could actually give you a year number on how old balls are.
Sean Walker: uh That'll be a
Andy Leviss: For when you say something's old as balls, but I can't remember what it is now. It's, it's worth googling though. I'm not gonna link to it in the show notes, however. Uh, um, yeah.
Sean Walker: tangent in one of the communities. We're not gonna put that in the show
Andy Leviss: Yeah, for sure. Uh, some, somebody can link to it in episode discussion.
Sean Walker: Yeah, there you go.
Andy Leviss: Um, or you can just ask my friend Google. Uh, yeah, so you want some sort of software to do it, and there's Generally, whether you're using wireless workbench or soundbase at a bare minimum, they give you a level of like, I forget if I forget if wireless workman calls it something different because it's been a while, but I know in cohort, it's basically there's like a default or a normal setting.
There's a robust and there's a more frequencies and basically what those air doing is they're fudging channel like how much space it's leaving between channels. It's like futzing with and or fudging, either term works, uh, whether you're like, whether you're leaving that space between only actual transmitters and like, which, if any of those like ghost intermod frequencies, you're caring about the spacing between.
So they're making compromises. Generally, when I'm working, I always try and start in the most robust because if I can get enough frequencies and that I know it's going to be rock solid, then I'll click down to like the normal default one, and then I'll only go into more frequencies at, you know, if I really need to,
Sean Walker: like Defcon five, emergency status if you need to.
Andy Leviss: yeah, or like you're doing like a big conference or like a festival or you just like you need every last frequency you can squeeze in.
So yeah, so wireless workbench, particularly if you're all on the shore stuff. It knows what all its gear is. So it's going to make it easier for you in that sense, because it's going to go in the right order. You tell it what I need this many PSM 900s, this many axioms, this many ULXDs, and it knows what order to do them in to maximize getting as many frequencies as possible, which is a benefit.
Sean Walker: super easy to use.
Andy Leviss: yeah, which is a benefit to working in that to a point till you really have to get into coaxing every last frequency you can when you need to know a little bit about what you're doing and when working in something like cohort becomes easier. So, but generally speaking. If you're, if you're just, that's where I get complicated.
Cause like on the one hand, I want to encourage people like learn sound base, it'll make your life easier. Long term that said quick and dirty wireless workbench. If you're working exclusively in a shore ecosystem, we'll probably get you up and running faster today.
Sean Walker: And having gone through this, you know, this journey as it were going from just scanning on the unit itself to setting up a network and doing wireless workbench or, you know, if you're in seh, their, their software too. I, I'm not, uh, I'm, I'm, we're, we are. Sure. So I'm used to wireless workbench. is like 2. 7 trillion percent better than just hoping and scanning on all the packs.
And, uh, if you can get your network set up and get your scan in and you've got something like a, uh, RF Explorer or a tiny SA ultra micro, whatever the thing is that Andy recommends that's way better that has Actual customer service, uh, you're like top 10 percent of RF coordinators already in the world.
Right? Like, that's where the bar is at. If you're, if you can fire up Workbench and operate Workbench and you have an RF scanner of some kind and you can read those scans, you're already in the top 10 percent of wireless coordinators in the world. And then, when 5%, sort out cord and get, get the nerd shit that Andy's going to go onto in a second because the rest of us nerds want to know this shit.
So, we're going to let him run, but Like, just get, you know, if you're a Sennheiser shop, get their program. If you're a Shure shop, get their program. If you've got a bunch of things to coordinate together, Chord is amazing, but like, just take step one and don't let perfect get in the way of good enough,
Andy Leviss: Absolutely. So, like in one of those, and I was talking to you, one of the things that you have to do for yourself when you use a program like SoundBase Cohort is you have to know what order to do things in, which basically you, you're sort of stacking two rankings. On the one hand, you're looking at flexibility.
Like if I've got like, you know, older Shore stuff, that's got like a very limited band range. Like I've got like my G50s or H50s or whatever. Those only tune so much. Whereas if I've got Axiants. Those can tune everywhere. So, you always want to coordinate the ones that can only tune at a narrow range first, because otherwise you're going to eat up those frequencies with the more flexible stuff that could go somewhere else.
Then it also becomes a matter of, of, uh, importance too. Like if, if I've got like fairly inflexible in ears and fairly inflexible mics, maybe my in ears are more important. So I'm going to do those first because they're more important. Also they take up a little more space because they have wider channels.
And then work your way along, get to the axioms last, kind of fit those in. So what I was saying is like with Workbench, if you've got all shore stuff and it knows all the stuff you need, it'll do that itself, because it knows what, to a degree. It's not going to know what's most important to you, but in terms of knowing what's most flexible and where it can squeeze frequencies for what.
It'll, it'll do a little better at that. Once you switch to using something like SoundBase, you need to know which ones, which ones to do first, and you need to make those decisions for yourself. You can try calculating them all pretty simultaneously. Once you get more than a few channels, it's not going to go so great.
So, that's, that's the biggest, one of the two biggest differences. The, so when you're working at Workbench, it's going to ask you how many channels you have. You're going to tell it, I've got this many receivers of this, this many of that. It's gonna crunch along and basically it's either gonna find enough for you plus a couple spares or it's gonna be like Yeah, fuck off.
This is how many I got and the one trick with both of with any of these programs If you're close but not quite enough frequencies, try running it again. Because the way these work is they randomly pick one frequency to start from for the first one, test if it's clean, and go until they find one clean frequency, and then keep randomly generating frequencies to test against that.
So if you rerun it, it starts from a totally different random starting point, which means it's going to come up with totally different results. Like, you can sit in co ord and like, refresh a stack of, you know, like, Accident frequencies and you'll see 15, then you'll see 18, then you'll see 21. Then you'll see like 15 again.
And you're like, fuck, I should have stopped when I had 21,
Sean Walker: Totally! It's like playing the lottery.
Andy Leviss: yeah. And keep going. And basically you find that number, you know, was like good enough and you keep re hitting it until you get the number. Sounds annoying,
Sean Walker: lock the frequencies that you do get though, like in Workbench when you get a bunch of good ones, lock those and then rerun the extra ones. Rather than trying to rerun everything because then you're only trying to find like let's say you've got 16 channels and 12 of the 16 Or work and lock those in workbench and then rerun the other four so that you're only trying to find four more not 16 more
Andy Leviss: to, to a degree, but if you keep doing that and it's not working then try crunching them all because you may get more. But yeah, first try the way Sean's doing it, and then if you really are beating your head against the wall as a last like kind of Hail Mary, go ahead and re crunch the whole thing. Um, so, yeah, so the thing, the thing like when you're doing it in pro, actually let me step back.
So the key, the other key difference in how Sound-based cohort works or ias if you, if you still have that or wireless workbench is that one is additive and one is, I don't think the word is subtractive, but I'm drawing a blank on what the word is right now. But they basically work, like I said, from opposite directions.
Sure. Wireless workbench is gonna try. You tell it, I need 20 frequencies, it's gonna keep trying to find you 20 frequencies and then you're, if I'm not mis misremembering, you were even telling it. Find me. 20 frequencies plus four spares. And if you, I believe if you don't tell it to,
Sean Walker: you can choose how many spares totally
Andy Leviss: yeah, but, but you have to tell it to give you spares, it's not going to give you spares automatically
Sean Walker: correct.
Andy Leviss: coming from the other direction, a program like is or, or sound base is going to, you tell it what model, what band to look at in a couple other parameters, and it is going to try and find you as many as it possibly can, it'll keep crunching.
So like, if you're trying to find like. 15 channels of accident. You search in your accident g 57 plus, it'll show you like, Hey, we've got 25 that are good with what you've got going on right now. Do you want to use all of them? How many of them do you want? And then you can select 15 pop those over into your mic group, maybe select four more, pop those into your spares group, call it a day and go on.
So it's a little bit different of a way to think about it, but it can be more flexible because of how it's doing that random seating. It can keep going, and it also gives you a little more insight into the compromises when you start getting okay. I can't fit all 40 of these channels in, which ones are most important, which ones do I squeeze frequencies out of, which ones do I not.
Rather than just being like, here's what I got for you. So, it gives you a little more power there. And then it also lets you dig a little into the deeper settings to try and squeeze more frequencies out. Because there's a bunch of options, and I'm going to link to, uh, Pete Erskine has a great, uh, the Rhodey's Guide to RF Coordination.
And it's a great guide walking you through. It, it uses IIS, but the settings generally translate, I think he's got a Workbench version too, and the same general settings translate to cohort, it's just in slightly different places. But he walks you through basically what order to start turning off tests to make stuff pass if you're trying to squeeze more frequencies out.
Because you're going to start, basically there's It's, it's just like harmonic frequencies with anything else. These inner mods are like there's first order third, or it's all the odd ones we care about. There's like first, third, fifth order and past a certain point there, they're weak enough that you often, you can get away with ignoring them.
And then also past a point it's, are we only caring about two transmitter intermod or do we care about intermod between three transmitters? In which case suddenly we're getting piles of other frequencies. And generally speaking, in a rock concert, you very rarely care about three transmitter. Where I might care about them is like, if I've got a singer with a vocal mic, a wireless guitar, and an in ear pack, then I'm going to care about those three playing together, because I know they're always going to be fairly on top of each other.
In musical theater, we care about it a bunch, because if I've got my two lead singers, both of which are double mic'd, And they're going to be doing all these romantic duets right on top of each other doing dancing. Then I'm going to care about three transmitter between any of their three transmitters.
So when we're starting a coordination, we're going to look at it with All the, all the first, third, fifth harmonics, all the like two and three transmitter intermods on, and then we're going to start turning those off. If I need to squeeze more frequencies out based on what I know I can get away with. If like my MC Mike is never on stage with anybody else, I might turn a lot of those off so that I can free up a frequency for him that might not be safe to put on stage with anybody else, but he's never going to be on stage with anybody else.
It's a safe gamble. It's always a little bit of a gamble. Um, but yeah, that's, and you can do a lot of these tweaks to test in Wireless Workbench. It's just a little easier to do in a program like SoundBase or IS, because they're designed to let you access these quickly. And again, it's one of those, you have to know what you're doing a little bit.
So like, read Pete's guide. There's some, some great videos we can link to. And like, know what you're doing with it. Read the documentation for SoundBase. But, like, once you understand that, it can give you a lot more power to, like, when you're trying to get 40 channels for a festival out. You know, workbench might be like, best I can do is 32, but if you know what variables you're playing with, you can squeeze a little bit more out.
Sean Walker: Totally dude.
Andy Leviss: So, so I hope that that makes sense and explains why we're saying like, look, although workbench makes it easy for you most of the time, it's worth learning these other tools for when you need it. Cause you don't want to learn it when you need it and you need frequencies in an hour.
Sean Walker: Totally Yeah, absolutely, and it's good to have you know, just the other perspective as you're going through the journey, right? It can be It can be a little overwhelming to try to start from the other end. You know what I mean? Starting at the workbench end makes it really easy. Like, hey, here's what I got sitting in front of me.
Like, how do I make this work is a pretty easy, straightforward question to be asking. But as you've got a little more experience and you're like, okay, man, uh, I need. 10 channels of whatever or 20 channels of whatever you don't mean you can then come from the other angle and like you said You've got a lot more finite control in the in the cord option.
Andy Leviss: Yeah, and, and the other cool thing about, about Court is since it's web based, while particularly the free version, it can be a little limiting because you need internet access, one of the pro features is being able to use it offline. Internet access means you can share a file and work on it simultaneously.
So like, if Sean's on a show site and he's like, Yo man, I'm fucked. I know I should be able to squeeze a few more frequencies out. And I just like, I'm, I'm lost, you know, Andy, are you around? Can you, you know, if I add you to the project, can you just take a look with me and make sure I'm not doing something silly?
You know, I can log in remotely through my web browser to his coordination, look at it and be like, Oh, here, turn that off, turn that off, try that. You're not doing anything silly, but do you feel like a gambling man? I can get you five freaks if you are, and I can help them out.
Sean Walker: I already feel my venmo, but on fire I don't I don't know if I can handle that
Andy Leviss: Um, send whiskey to, um, and in fact, I ended up not having to do it, but we have, I'm, I'm not going to name names, but we have a mutual friend of ours. Um, you know, a member of the discord community who texted me for some advice on some, trying to squeeze some frequencies out. And I was like, look, if you need to, if you're in cohort, add me and I'll, I'll take a look at it over your shoulder with you.
Not a problem. Um, and he actually ended up. Just being able to swap out some, some, like, some G50s for H50s and making his life work because he was in an area where G50s just ain't gonna work.
Sean Walker: Fair
Andy Leviss: so he didn't need it.
Sean Walker: That's a pretty cool feature though, dude that you can log in remotely like that's that's sweet
Andy Leviss: And, and it's also cool because, like, you can even give limited access. So, like, I can generate A just a live updating frequency list that I can send to you, or I can post backstage at Patchland on a QR code.
So all the A2s can just scan it and pull up a list of the frequencies. And even if I have to make edits to it as we're going along, it'll live update as long as they're on an internet connection so they can see it, but they can't accidentally change stuff on.
Sean Walker: dude. That's dope
Andy Leviss: Yeah, there's some cool shit. We're going to get Donny and Matt on at some point.
They're, they're, they're very busy these days because they've just gone from having other jobs too. Full time working on SoundBase, Sennheiser threw a bunch of money towards SoundBase to help support development. So, but we'll get them on because I want to get their story and also like let them talk a little more in detail about it than I necessarily can.
Sean Walker: Yeah, dude.
Andy Leviss: Um, so the other
Sean Walker: Oh, I love that QR code idea though, dude is you're like Here's, here's the list
Andy Leviss: Oh, there's all sorts in like for, for larger, for larger stuff where there's like bands coming in or like, you know, ENG crews coming in, you can have a QR code that brings you to a frequency request form where you fill out. Here's my name. Here's my phone. Here's my email. I need five frequencies for this electrosonics, like, you know, camera transmitter, you know, please submit.
And then it'll pop up on the RF coordinators workspace and I can be like, Oh, okay. Five electrosonics for, you know, news crew 25. Here we go. Here's your frequencies,
Sean Walker: Can we set that up for the NFL when they're here for the Seahawks? Instead of just telling us to pound sand, they can be like, Yeah man, here's your two freaks.
Andy Leviss: Yeah. Oh, the
Sean Walker: a chance, right?
Andy Leviss: RF coordination in, in sports outside of something like the, the super bowl is a conversation for another day. It is. It's sometimes astounds me how little these, how little coordination there actually ends up being. It's, it's a little wild. Um, again, conversation for another day, alcohol probably needs to be involved.
Sean Walker: Alright, fair enough.
Andy Leviss: Um, so, but before, before we wrap up and, and like I said, I'm going to point folks towards some resources to like get nerdy on learning the software. Cause that's not something we can explain in an audio podcast easily. But Sean talked about scanning, and that's the other about, and not scanning on the receiver, but scanning with an analyzer.
And that's the other thing I want to dig into a little bit here. Um, which the one thing is, look, you can always, in any of the software, you can punch in the address, punch in the zip code, pull up the TV frequencies from the FCC database to see what TV channels you have to avoid, or they're gonna, you know, step on you with all sorts of noise.
I'm trying to think how to put this. The FCC is a government organization. And it's not one with a huge budget for this kind of stuff. It's got a huge budget for other things that keeping those databases up to date is exactly the bureaucratic mess you think it is. So they're not always up to date. And then there's also shit like.
They'll have, like, that database won't show something that's got, like, a testing permit that's only on intermittently. But it could be on when you're doing your show, and you could be fucked, because if you're going off looking up the address or going off an out of date scan, because you don't know that TV's channel's there, and then you fire up your receiver and, like, why are the meters lighting up like Christmas trees?
So, the number one thing you can do once you've already made the step of using some sort of software to coordinate is do a scan day of in the venue. That
Sean Walker: And scanners you can be had for like a hundred bucks or a hundred something bucks. They're not like And here's this 2, 000 tool you gotta go buy, it's like 100 on Amazon for what he's
Andy Leviss: you wanna, if you wanna spend three thousand, four thousand on an analyzer I can tell you which ones to buy, they're, they're getting you like incremental difference over the TinySA Ultra. It's like under two hundred bucks or so. It is ridiculously good for its price. So, up until recently, RF Explorer was the one that everybody liked.
It is, it's like the Pro Tools of spectrum analyzers. It's not the best, it's just the first that was okay enough. Like, and that's what I, and I know I'm gonna piss people off by saying that because people love their Pro Tools, but, that's always been my perspective on Pro Tools is, it's not the industry standard because it was fantastic, it's the industry standard because it was the first one that didn't suck.
Sean Walker: I don't know, it's pretty rad dude, I've made a lot of records in Pro Tools.
Andy Leviss: I, I'm not saying you can't,
Sean Walker: I'll fight you on that, I'll die on that hill.
Andy Leviss: I, and it's certainly gotten better, but for a long time it was, it was, like, It didn't do anything dramatically better than a lot of other DAWs that came shortly after it did. It just got there first and it became the standard because it was the, it was the first tool that like really did all the things as much as was capable at the time.
Sean Walker: Alright, so what does the tiny SA Ultra do that an RF Explorer doesn't other than have customer service?
Andy Leviss: um, the, the, there's some things in resolution and like just the quality of the stuff that's in it. The biggest thing is I can trust the data from it.
Sean Walker: Oh,
Andy Leviss: So, so there's, again, it's It's getting into like deeper esoteric physics stuff that nobody listening to this podcast wants to hear me try and butcher my way through an explanation on the podcast.
But the way that the analyzer radios work and, and that receivers work in general, there's like different filters and stuff that like, you know, frequencies get added together and subtracted to like tune to what you want to look at. And you end up because of that on a lot of cheaper radios and analyzers, you end up with Spurious frequencies or what are what you'll hear people call spurs which are little ghost frequencies To a certain distance above and below the frequency you're actually looking at Based on the math of that filter and they will be symmetrical usually to your frequency And and they don't actually exist.
They're just they're again It's basically intermod happening inside the receiver inside the analog the rf explorer Some of the models have Digital filtering to avoid that some of them don't so a lot of the 430 to 960 model, the sub one gig that a lot of us got back in the day doesn't like if you had the dual one that had that plus the wider band for a long time, people were like, well, use the narrow band.
It's it's got finer resolution steps. But it turns out it didn't have filtering for that. So you were actually better off using the wider band module of the two, but even there, you just, you don't know what you're doing. The other issue is that you run into desensitization, which is like basically. Strong signals in the area, like around what you're looking at, can basically, again, somebody's going to yell at me for oversimplifying this explanation, but they can kind of overload the receiver and basically it's pushing noise floor up in a way that literally it desensitizes the receiver.
Sean Walker: it confuses the receiver where you can't get a lot of real clean
Andy Leviss: and you have, and the problem is, you have no way of knowing that that's happening, unless you've got something else to compare it to. So, you both could be seeing ghost frequencies from those spurs that aren't really there, but you don't know that they're not really there, unless you know what to look out for.
But then if you do know what to look out for, is it not really there, or does it happen that the spur lines up with an actual frequency that's interfering? Who knows? Likewise, If desense is happening, you don't really have a way of knowing it till you turn your receiver on and suddenly, like, something that looked like there wasn't interference there is slamming you.
So the TinySA has, has, uh, particularly the Ultra has better filtering for some of that stuff and on both the hardware side and the DSP side. It's a little more trustworthy, and it's no more expensive and often cheaper than the RF Explorer was.
Sean Walker: Well, all of those are wins in my book. Better, more accurate, and less expensive. Come on, dog. That's a win.
Andy Leviss: Yeah. So if you're buying today, I would say get the tiny SA ultra call it a day. If you've got an RF Explorer, I would say, I, I hate to tell folks to spend money, but if you, if you can afford it or when you can afford it, if you've got an RF Explorer upgrade to the tiny essay, it'll. It'll give you, if nothing else, more confidence that what you're seeing is what you're seeing.
And look, end of the day, if you need to, like, do it, like, Shore and Wireless Workbench, you can use a receiver to do a scan. It's gonna be slow, but it'll be fine. And the benefit there is you're actually seeing what it looks like through the radio of your receiver, baller. So the other thing, the other thing with scans is like, I will generally do two scans when I'm coordinating a show.
I will first do an omnidirectional like whip antenna or like the little like big fat chonky boy shore omnidirectional antenna or the Sennheiser one. I want to see my worst case and I will try coordinating with that worst case first. If I can't get there and then also just to know what I'm dealing with, I will then take a directional paddle and do a scan with that.
Sean Walker: And are those scans? That was going to be my next question for you is where are we putting this tiny SA ultra in our signal chain? Is that, are we using the little whip that comes with it? Are we plugging it into our distro? Are we, you know, plugging into the
Andy Leviss: So yeah, so that that first scan use the whip that came with it or like I said, I usually like to do an external omnidirectional just so I can You know, place it more out in the middle of stuff and, and, you know, just have a slightly more robust antenna. And that I know is wide band the whip kind of, you're always making a compromise in length, you know, based on how long it is for what frequency it's tuned to
Sean Walker: That's what she
Andy Leviss: it's, and, and it's generally going to be good enough, but if you really want to like a wide band Omni antenna will help you out if you can.
Again. That's money that the average person listening to this, you'll be fine not spending it. I like to do it because I like, I like having that better picture of knowing what I'm looking at.
Sean Walker: But you, but you know, knowing that having that information also means that as we're out on job sites and we can see what's around us, what the vendor has included, you can go, Oh, there is a wide band. I'll just use that for my scan today. And that can be helpful. Or all I've got is paddles. Maybe I'll just either use one of the, you know, whips that came with the thing or the whip that came with my Tiny Essay Ultra, right?
Andy Leviss: totally. So, so that base scan, I'm going to do omni antenna, no distro, nothing, because I want to get the most signal coming in. I literally want the worst case of what my receiver could possibly see. Once I switch to doing a directional antenna scan, I'm going to do that through the antenna distro that my receivers are going to, so I see exactly what they're seeing.
Likewise, if I monitor the analyzer during the show, I'm going to do that through the intended distro again, so that I see what the receivers are seeing. Um, but get that scan. Uh, it gets a little bit into religion. If you ask, if you do. If you're doing a peak scan or an average scan, there's arguments to be made for either.
An average scan is like the, look, if there's something that pops in intermittently, odds are that's not something I need to worry about, or it's not something I can do something about. An average tells me what TV channels are there, what permanent transmitters are there. That's good enough. The argument, obviously, then, for doing like a max hold or a peak scan is if something shows up even for like, you know, a second.
I want to account for it in case it comes back on. So, I'll, uh,
Sean Walker: depend on the importance of the show and the importance of the, that particular channel and, right? Wouldn't that be a few things to take into consideration?
Andy Leviss: And, and I mean, in generally like the folks who argue for, for doing an average argue that anything that's likely to be on enough to interfere with you during the show will show up in a, you know, a five minute or ten minute average scan, you know, just as well as they'll show up in like a, a five minute peak hold.
So, you know, make your own decision, experiment a little bit. Either approach is arguably valid. You want, but you want some sort of scan so that you can see what's there because then you can verify what TV channels are actually there. You can see like, oh, that looks like a wireless microphone from somewhere.
Nobody had it on a list. Nobody knows where it's from. But there's a steady thing at, you know, 514. 775. I better take that into account.
Sean Walker: Totally.
Andy Leviss: and depending on the, I think Workbench can be set to actually like avoid stuff in the scan too. It's not just informational. Um, Cohort and IAS, it's, IAS, if you're using IAS, which we're, I said, we're not digging too deep into because if you don't already have it, don't buy it, it's not getting developed anymore.
Cohort is free in the basic version. It does all the same things. Um. In IAS, the scan was only informational. You saw it, you could avoid stuff in it, but it didn't actually calculate against that. In cohort, I believe by default, and definitely you can toggle on, you can tell it to account for what's in the scan, and you can tell it to avoid anything in the scan, or you can tell it to set a threshold, and anything below this threshold, I don't care about.
You can pretend it's not there, anything above it, avoid. So, that gives you a little more, a little more flexibility and power to make sure you're staying out of the way of the shit you need to stay out of the way from, and that. Everything is gonna work how you need it to. Um, and, and, the other thing I'll say with scans, to put, put out front, and I've been guilty of this in the past, it is really easy, particularly if you get like a higher cost, faster analyzer, to set that resolution really fine, and like get Too much data, which a, the skin gets really noisy and hard to read B it's just so much data to upload and you don't necessarily need that right away.
Like when you're scanning, like the whole, like four 30 to, you know, six, whatever, like if you're scanning that whole tuning range. Like you don't want like every, you know, 10 K step in there and that you don't need that. You need to see broad trends. You want to see where there's a gap, where there's a TV channel, where there's very obviously a transmitter from that.
So when you're doing that wideband scan, keep it a little, like you can try your, whatever analyzer you have in like auto mode or like the narrowest you would want to go is like a bandwidth of like 30 K. That's going to make your data a little chunkier. It's going to bring your noise floor up a little bit, but it'll give you more manageable data, and it'll be a little faster.
If you're doing a lot of frequencies and you want to like be like really like on the nose about it then basically once you start picking out frequencies then you tune into like you zoom in tighter to like one or two UHF like TV channels at a time and that's where you can look and make sure that you're actually clean with like that narrow bandwidth where it'll be faster.
And that's not the scan you're saving, that's the scan you're just looking at just to confirm that the number the program gave you is actually going to work. Um, that's kind of what I have for software that I can throw in 40 minutes. The one other thing I want to walk through quick is what's known as wargaming, which is how you verify frequencies afterwards.
Cause just like when you're tuning a system with smart or whatever, You want to go back and listen with your ears. You're not going to blindly trust the software coordinating frequencies is the same thing. So you're going to do what's known as war game, which is you take all your transmitters, you line them up.
You turn them on one at a time. You make sure they're all synced and coming up on the right receivers. And then you're going to go through them one at a time. You're going to take transmitter one. You're going to turn it off and you're gonna make sure that it's meter goes clear, and then you're going to turn it back on, you're gonna move to transmitter two, you're going to turn that off, make sure it's meter goes clear.
And then turn it back on and you're going to do that through each one because what that is then telling you is that when I turn this transmitter off, none of the other transmitters are creating an intermod interference that's going to show up on that receiver. So you're double checking the math. If you do that, like kind of on your table, your workstation right by your antennas, that's your absolute worst case scenario.
So like. If that shows up clean, anywhere on stage is going to show up clean. And then, I guess the last tip that stream of consciousness brings me to, is loaf pans, or barbecue tins. The little like, either aluminum or steel, you know, rectangular tubs. Buy a pile of those, throw them in your work box. Throw the transmitters in.
Ideally, you want ones long enough for your handhelds that the whole handheld can sit in this tin. If you can't do that, try and put the handheld out so that the antenna part of the handheld is in the tin, and the mic is pointing out. What that's going to do is that metal shield Is it going to duck down the signal of that transmitter a little bit so that when you have a dozen microphones sitting by your, a two station, right on top of your receivers, they're not overloading all the receivers.
Cause once you're right on top of the receivers, all those antennas, all those inner mound products, right on top of everything, they can interfere and they can de sense the receivers. analyzers. So putting. Putting microphones in those, like, loaf pans, pie tins, whatever you want to call them, will clean things up a little bit and keep you from causing problems for yourself when mics are offstage.
Sean Walker: You're right. That makes a lot of sense. I like it.
Andy Leviss: So, and, and hopefully, like, some, some, you know, aluminum loaf pans or steel loaf pans from the hardware store or the supermarket, hopefully that's not too much of an expensive friend tip.
Sean Walker: No, that's not too expensive. Also, the blueberry lemon loaf is a favorite at the house. The kids love that. So, you know, if you
Andy Leviss: Just, just wash them first.
Sean Walker: yeah, yeah, totally. Ha ha ha
Andy Leviss: Well, eat them first, then wash them. Don't wash the, don't wash the
Sean Walker: 100%.
Andy Leviss: That's every, everybody, like, sound off an episode discussion today and let us know what your favorite Entenmann's product to repurpose a loaf pan from
Sean Walker: yeah, what's your favorite loaf, y'all? What's your favorite loaf?
Andy Leviss: Sean is my favorite loaf.
Sean Walker: Ah, shit.
Andy Leviss: All right, well, that's bringing us around like 45 minutes. And I think without getting somebody else who can explain the math better without diagrams than I can, I think we're close to getting people's eyes glazing over. So that might be a spot to wrap it and say, if folks have questions on RF, like hit us up in the discord.
If folks have issue with something I described or like you idiot, that's not how it works. I want to
Sean Walker: Ooh, send a postcart.
Andy Leviss: Yeah. Signal to noise at prosandweb. com hit us up in the discord. Let us know. Uh, and we can certainly revisit this again, but hopefully that gives folks a little information. I'll make some threads to tug at with wireless stuff and coordination and help you help yourself.
Sean Walker: Totally. And there is an RF channel in the Discord. If you've got more questions, you can get your nerd on in there and ask all the questions you want, and Andy and everybody else in there will be super happy to answer them for you. Well, I think that is a good place to wrap. Thanks to Ellen Heath and RCF for letting us get our nerd on for the, uh, you know, 700, 000, 357th week in a row, kisses and hugs.
That's the, that's the pod y'all.
Andy Leviss: Take care, everybody.
Music: “Break Free” by Mike Green
