Marathon Sees Vislink Trial Deep Interleaving On Link Wireless Camera Systems

This year's coverage of the London Marathon saw the first field trials of Vislink's Deep Interleaving system.
Working with SIS LIVE, Europe's largest OB and uplink provider, Link engineers supervised the installation of a standard XPu compact vehicle transmitter loaded with deep interleaving firmware onto one of the four bikes used to transmit pictures on the move along the entire 26 mile course.
The four bikes up-linked the signals to a Skylink aircraft operating at an altitude of 7000m, which then relayed the signals back to a receive point in west London.
Deep Interleaving greatly improves link ruggedness and is particularly effective at filling small breaks in coverage due to trees, bridges and street furniture. The transmitted signal is effectively scrambled and additional error correction added. Any single burst of errors or large breaks in reception are effectively converted into several small errors during the receive de-scrambling process, enabling the error correction to 'repair' the signal.
The tests were extremely productive, allowing both Link and SIS LIVE engineers to gain valuable data and operational experience with the new system.
Nick Buckley, Sound and Comms Operations Manager at SIS LIVE commented: "We ran it on the longest time setting and the benefits were clear on the sections where the bike ran under trees. It worked so smoothly and consistently that it was used on air on Sunday for the last couple of miles along the embankment and through St James Park which is heavily tree lined as the runners approach the finish line."
The success of the trials means the new system will be available in the next few weeks and unlike rival systems, the Link solution does not require additional hardware, simply a software licence.
It will be initially released on the XPu compact vehicle-mount transmitter platform, eventually rolling out to the L1500 and L1600 SD/HD transmitters. All these units already benefit from Link's unique LMS-T modulation, which greatly improves link ruggedness and bit-rate capacity compared with conventional DVB-T systems.
Further information is available at: www.vislink.com.
(KMcA/BMcC)