Devon County Radio / BBC Radio Devon

INDEX

BROADCAST EQUIPMENT:
Here's a selection of some of our finest technical friends ( and foes) who helped to keep the needles wagging across the decades.


COMREX Courier		COMREX ( now Sonifex) - The Courier is the nearest thing to a replacement to the Uher. It's heavy and bulky with a fairly large battery as used in small VCR's The operational controls are robust and clear. Recording is onto a Compact Flash card housed in a PCMCIA type carrier. The most intereresting experience I have with them is formatting a brand new flash card which you then find doesn't work - answers on a post card please. Like a Uher it could be a good self-defence weapon!

MATRIX Vortex ( Comrex )		The Matrix unit is useful in areas like Devon where Radio car signal often can't work because there is no line of site. There's a PSTN version and a GSM version. Both work in the same way, using smart software to assess what bandwidth is available and adjust it's bit rate accordingly. The down side is that quality can drop off drastically if bandwith is reduced, and this can happen quite suddenly, but they have proved very useful in the field saving money on temporary ISDN installations for elections as an example.

GLENSOUND ISDN COOBE (GSGC5) MX6		GLENSOUND make arguably some of the best and most useful broadcast kit available. They have an idea of what sort of boxes are useful to broadcasters with a minimum of knobs and button, and most of their stuff can be dropped on the floor, left in the rain, and kicked around in the boot of a car and it still won't let you down. The ISDN COOBE ( Commentator Operated Outside Broadcat Equipment) is just such an item. Brilliant at what it does, and easy to fix and repair if it does get damaged. It's basically a 4 channel mixer with a TA and Codec to interface with ISDN's at G722. The clever bit is the way it can connect and switch the channels of to a pre-programmed patter, - headphone mix controls for Cue/Mix are also useful, plus a good battery life - plenty of warning before it dies!

Prodys PRONTO ISDN unit.		T