2014 in Review

2014 was another busy year at DCI, here are some of our highlights:

Janurary: Ambit Baltimore production
We kicked the year off with a large production and uplink as part of a corporate event held in Baltimore.  DCI provided the transmission, along with the switcher, graphics, cameras and audio in the conference room, including a jib camera. 

February:  Russian Ambassador's Olympic Party

The Sochi Olympics opening ceremony took place late morning DC time, and was not available live in the United States.  We were asked to receive a feed of the event brought in from Russian TV (encrypted, of course, to keep NBC happy).  We parked our compact satellite truck outside of the gilded former Russian Embassy down the street from the White House, which now serves as the Ambassador's residence.  The Ambassador was hosting a party for VIPs to watch the opening ceremony on monitors spread out throughout the reception rooms.  The embassy staff brought Black Sea caviar and tea out to the satellite truck. 

May:  Live Surgery in 3D

DCI and BoxLine Box produced the first-ever 3D surgery broadcast at the AUA convention in San Diego in 2013, for Intuitive Surgical.  The 2013 show was so successful we were asked back to produce all the live surgery at the 2014 convention in Orlando.  After the AUA show, we took the sat truck down to Miami, and did our own downlink using our Norsat flyaway and a remote-controlled receiver for an AUA-related event at the Eden Roc in Miami Beach with the truck transmitting from Miami General Hospital.  Read more about the 3D surgery here. 

July:  Havana and Santiago, Cuba
We took two flyaway systems to Cuba for the second time in as many years. This trip was to cover the state visit of Xi Jinping, President of China, to Cuba.  We set up one system outside the Nacional Hotel in Havana before driving 8 hours across the island to the port city of Santiago for live coverage for Chinese TV.
More from the 2014 Cuba trip.

August:  US-Africa Leaders' Summit
In August 2014, President Obama hosted the US-Africa Leaders' Summit, which was the most heads of state in Washington ever.  With so many VIP's in the city, logistics were difficult, and both of our satellite trucks were present to be the pool feed for host broadcaster Bloomberg TV.  Our HD1 uplink truck provided six muxed HD paths with multiple audio languages, while our compact SNG truck stood as backup.

September:  First ESPN backhaul
A year after finishing our qualification for ESPN in Bristol, we snagged our first job for the network, a college football game in Cincinnati (held in the Brown's stadium) for ESPN-2. including a full 16 channels of audio.

November:  Ferguson, MO
Our HD1 uplink truck travelled to the St. Louis area to cover the rioting in Furgeson.  This was actually the first of two last-minute trips we made for this story, the second was a month later when the grand jury results were announced.  We provided multiple HD and SD uplinks to Europe during this job.

November:  Live Surgery in Vancouver, BC
We provided transportable downlink services in Vancouver, British Columbia for the annual meeting of the AAGL organization.  We arranged the transmission facilities at two hospitals in the United States and performed quality control on the live feeds.  This location was a challenge because tall buildings limited us to edge of the arc satellites, low on the horizon. This resulted in some adjacent satellite interference because of the 1.1m portable antenna, which is more suited for transmitting than receiving.  But we had expected this and planned ahead- purchasing more bandwidth than would normally be used so we could switch to lower-complexity modulation and overcome the noise issues.  The Ateme receivers we brought provided a real-time signal quality graph which assisted in aiming the dish beyond the limits of the portable spectrum analyzer to get optimum signal quality.  The location itself was great- in the shadow of the Vancouver Olympic Torch on one side, and seaplanes landing and taking off on the other side.  Thankfully, Vancouver's persistent rainy weather held off for our event.  More.

December:  COP20 in Lima, Peru
We returned to Lima, Peru for the first time in over 20 years to cover the UN COP20, an annual followup to the Kyoto Protocol climate change meetings.  This is our second COP event, having covered one held in Cancun a few years before.  This was also the second deployment for our new flyaway dish, and it worked flawlessly.  The biggest difficulty was the setup and breakdown, after the event staff tried to cement our cables into place and laid a brick walkway over them. More here.

December 31
We finished up the year with some more live TV, using our camera-back microwave system to cover a New Year's Eve party at DC's famous Howard Theater.  A HD microwave receiver with diversity antennas spread around back stage allowed our camera to roam freely throughout the venue, even go live from the street outside of the theater- all completely wireless to the uplink truck!

 

We are looking forward to another great year in 2015! 

Contact DCI

UN Climate Conference, "COP20" Lima

DCI provided transmission facilities at the 20th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP20), held in Lima Peru for two weeks at the beginning of December.  We deployed our second generation airline flyaway to transmit two SD or 1 HD paths in a 4.5MHz slot on the Satmex 8 satellite.  The recent loss of Satmex 5 to inclined orbit has greatly reduced the occasional use capacity available on the Satmex fleet, one of our favorite for South to North one-hop coverage.

 The Eurovision MCR room (top) and the main venue MCR (below)

A replacement satellite, known as Satmex 7 / Eutelsat 115B will soon be launched!  Using H.264 encoding and DVB-S2 8PSK at very low error correction (FEC) rates of 8/9 allowed us to transmit a HD picture of the same quality typically done in 6 MHz.  By measuring the link margins at the receive side we were able to determine we could successfully use the 8/9 FEC to achieve the same quality in larger bandwidth, with a still-acceptable link margin. 


Setting up was probably the most challenging part of this job, requiring a fiber cable to the cameras that went through two conduits and almost got cemented in place!  The setup took an entire day before we were ready to do liveshots.  

The conference was held on the grounds of a military base known as "El Pentagonito" (The Small Pentagon) and made up of a compound of large temporary buildings.

The event went smoothly, except for the bus rides from our hotel to the venue, which sometimes took over 90 minutes due to the traffic in Lima.

The breakdown was fun, as we had discovered our cables has been squeezed between two sheets of plywood over one of the conduit vaults and had an interlocking brick walkway installed over it.  There was not enough room for the fiber cable head to be extracted through the small space they left, so we improvised and used a screwdriver to break a hole in the plywood and remove the cabling. 



More photos HERE.

Live Surgery in Vancouver, BC

Last week, DCI teamed up again with BoxLine Box medical media to bring high quality live surgery to the annual meeting of the AAGL, held in Vancouver, Canada.   While much smaller than the AUA event where we coordinate more than a dozen live surgeries, the AAGL event had its own challenges.

The entire receive-only flyaway, consisting of the 1.1m dish, two IRDs, spectrum monitor, handheld SDI generator and monitor, and a utility case of cables takes up only 3 cases, easily checkable on any airline.

The convention center told us "no has been successful getting satellite" to work reliably at the convention center, and they blamed it on radar from the nearby airport.  They suggested downlinking it at a Bell Canada facility in Toronto and fibering it across Canada.  This approach would take the quality control of the feeds out of our hands, something that has made our live surgery broadcasts the highest quality and most reliable in the industry.   During these conferences, DCI hires the local uplink trucks at each hospital, and provides quality control of encoding and RF parameters, coordinating with the uplinks to make adjustments as necessary to get the best balance of quality and margin. 

We came equipped with a 1.1m Ku flyaway and a expectation of having to make adjustments.  One of the biggest issues we had was with a smaller downlink dish and a high latitude location that made the satellites "stack" up on each other, and with the wide beamwidth of a 1.1m dish, we were getting a lot of adjacent satellite interference.  This could explain the trouble others have had at this location.  The portable spectrum analyzers we use don't have enough resolution bandwidth to really peak the adjacent satellite out, so we improvised by using the real-time margin graph on our Ateme IRDs to peak the signal for maximum C/N margin, regardless of what the spectrum looked like.  Its similar to how analog shots were peaked up years ago, by using a real-time signal strength meter on the receiver.

Our originally planned parameters of 8PSK 2/3 had insufficient margin, so dropping down to QPSK 3/4 gave us margins of around 4dB.  We planned for this and reserved more satellite bandwidth than we would use when downlinking in our 2.4m "HD1" satellite truck.

Our dish was set up directly above the Vancouver seaplane airport, one of the only seaplane bases in the world with a control tower.  This base serves dozens of scheduled flights to the islands in everything from vintage deHavilland Beavers to large twin turboprop float planes.  We even had time to take a quick tour in one of the 1964 deHavilland.  After the second live surgery was done, we packed up and headed to the airport, another flawless live surgery events in the books.

If you are interested in how DCI can bring this high level of transmission quality control and management of your corporate events, contact us.  If you need to produce a live event or recording of a live surgery in the unique setting of a working operating room, contact BoxLine Box.

More photos from this event

Wireless Cameras

Whenever Hollywood portrays live TV reporters, they one thing they always get wrong is there is never a cable going between the camera and truck.  A typical SNG cable reel is between 250-400 feet long, weighs 30-60 pounds.  It usually carries one or two video lines, plus several audio cables which in the past were used for microphones along with communications (IFB and Intercom), but now with digital SDI video and embedded audio, they are mainly just used for the comms.

 A little bit more than a typical SNG reel!

Within the past few years, heavy-duty tactical fiber optical cable has become popular, but that is another post!

 

SNG Fiber

Whenever a satellite truck is set up for a live shot, these cables have to be strung to the camera.  Sometimes it is simply just a few feet from the truck, other times the cable has to be run through a building, requiring an hour or more of hard work.

People often ask why it can't be wireless... after all they can stream video reliably over mobile phones, use WiFi, and a host of other wireless data services.  The main answer is unlike IP based streaming, which may have at least 30 seconds of delay built-in for error correction, wireless for live reporting has to be very low delay, otherwise the lag between reporter and anchor during talk-backs is very noticeable.  Also since it will be encoded again, very high bitrates are required. 

DCI is proud to be the only SNG company in the Washington area to own our camera-back microwave system, and one of the few SNG companies in the entire country to have a licensed microwave system of any kind.  Other systems use the crowded public WiFi bands of 5.4 or 2.4 GHz, but our system operates in a licensed band at 6.4 GHz, allowing better range resulting from less interference.

This is the same system we deployed as a fixed-position link every July 4th, but its most versatile when connected to the back of a roaming camera.  

This camera-back system is extremely useful when needing to cover an event where cabling is not possible, such as in Lafayette Park in front of the White House.  The only place to park a SNG truck is across a busy road, so covering protests inside the park require a wireless link like DCI's Campack system, or for crews without a wireless kit, going live from across the street, a far less appealing location.  Another use is when covering another popular Washington news event, a march to the Capitol.  By placing the truck at a central location and using directional antennas, we can have a mobile reporter go live while covering one of these marches.  Paired with a simple UHF wireless IFB system for reporter and camera, the camera-back transmitter gives DCI a unique edge when challenging live shots solutions are required.

 

LafayettePark live shot

Contact DCI to see how we can put our wireless systems to use for your next broadcast.

Cuba 2014

 

Working in Cuba is always an adventure!  When the Chinese president planned a visit to Cuba after the BRICS summit in Brazil, national broadcaster CCTV planned a large operation.  The president planned two stops- Havana, just 90 miles from Key West, and Santiago, about 500 miles away on the south-east coast.



CCTV insisted on full path diversity at both locations, that means two uplinks at each location, two different satellites, and  two discrete routes to China from the two receive sites US, using both fiber and satellite. 



Operating an uplink in Cuba requires copious amounts of paperwork and licenses, and two flyaways makes it twice as much!  After an eight hour wait to clear customs, we loaded our gear up on a 1934 Ford truck to carry it to the Nacional hotel in Havana.
 
The first kit used our first generation airline flyaway, a 1.1m Patriot connected to Xicom 400w transmitters in a 1:1 configuration.  The transmission plan called for SD MPEG-2 video broadcast a very high quality 16mbps with 4:2:2 compression using 8PSK modulation in a 9MHz slot.



Setup and testing went smooth, however CCTV requested a second path for live shots, which we able to support by combining a smaller 4.5 MHz signal on the uplink chain.  That path utilized H.264 compression and DVB-S2 QPSK modulation at 6 mbps.



At this time a second engineer arrived to take over operation of the Havana flyaway while the second system traveled 11 hours across the country to Santiago de Cuba.



The countryside has some of the best, freshest food in the country, and much cheaper than the cities. 

Upon arriving in Santiago we found a spot where we could get a shot (the only satellites covering Santiago are very far to the west, resulting in look angles much lower than you would expect for being so far south)

The Santiago flyaway was our new modified Norsat system, connected to a pair of linearized 400w BUCs, allowing us to locate the encoders far away under shelter.  After one day of feeding, we packed up and drove the 11 hours back to Havana, and hopped a cargo charter to Miami the next day.


Need a flyaway uplink in a difficult location, or just a SNG truck around town in DC?  Give DCI a call!