NEP Group Selects RTS For Equinox OB Truck

NEP Group has introduced its Equinox outside broadcast truck, which is being used to deliver all UK horse racing television coverage.

Equinox is capable of meeting every requirement for the live broadcast of race meets, without additional support, with OMNEO IP technology at the core of its technical infrastructure.

In 2016, a catastrophic fire tore through the NEP Group's UK headquarters, destroying most of its outside broadcasting fleet and reducing its rare equipment library to ashes. The company decided to immediately rebuild, meeting all of its commitments while also using the opportunity to create a new fleet of cutting-edge OB vehicles, including RTS IP-based intercoms.

Paul Fournier, Head of Sound for NEP UK, reflected: "It's both a bad and a good thing that we had a fire. It meant that we had to rebuild everything very quickly, but it also afforded us the opportunity to update to the very latest IP technology all at once."

Equinox is the fifth truck to be commissioned since the fire and has now entered service with a specification that is similar to its siblings, but shaped specifically to meet the challenges of broadcasting British horse racing.

"The broadcaster wanted to run the truck in a very specific way, so we built this truck to deliver everything they wanted to achieve," explained Fournier. "Rather than having to accommodate a separate voice track/recording replay truck, everything is done out of this single vehicle, and the use of IP simplifies how everything works."

Inside Equinox, an RTS ADAM modular matrix frame equipped with a 64 channel OMI OMNEO matrix interface card offers up to 272 ports, providing a Dante backbone for the OB truck's comms workflow. In addition, the frame hosts five AIO-16 analog interface cards, a MADI-16 Plus interface card and two TBX-Tribus cards for connecting Equinox with other trucks in the NEP fleet. A total of ten 32-key KP-5032 keypanels have been integrated into the vehicle, alongside a further 31 16-key KP-4016 panels.

Asked about his choice of OMNEO IP technology for the future-proofed fleet, and Equinox in particular, Fournier addressed the benefits of working in an audio-over-IP environment. He said: "OMNEO, which facilitates the use of Dante audio, has really taken off in the broadcast world over the last two years. The choice of OMNEO means that we benefit from vastly reduced cabling – all a KP-5032 or KP-4016 keypanels needs is a Cat-5 Ethernet or a fiber connection. Even if we have a long-distance run over kilometers, we can fiber it. In fact many of the horse racing grounds serviced by Equinox are now being retrofitted with permanent fiber, so if you need to position a panel somewhere on site then it's easy to do so.

"The use of Dante audio makes it simple for us to provide preview boxes for the director and producer; you can simply pin them in the Dante audio network through the RTS system. Because we have Dante cards in our desks, there's no patching involved – everything just appears on the network, so you can pick it up, make an IFB out of it and pass it on."

The flexibility of the system has proven its worth at horse racing venues, where members of the production team are sometimes based far from the truck. "If someone using a remote panel wants program sound on a little monitor speaker, and we don't have any wire there but we do have an RTS panel, then we can pin program audio from the desk to one of the spare Dante inputs of the panel, then reroute it to the panel's XLR and simply plug the little speaker in," continued Fournier. "We can achieve that with no extra wire required other than a mains lead."

In the video below, Paul Fournier (Head of Sound) and Rob Jackson (Senior Sound Engineer) from NEP UK talk about their latest 4K truck, using OMNEO IP-technology and their business relationship to RTS intercoms.



rtsintercoms.com