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Le Mans 24 Hour Race – all night live race coverage using Link’s Cellular Diversity and new wireless
Date: 20-06-2008
The French production company, Visual TV, provided 24 hour coverage of the Le Mans 24 Hour Race 2008, capturing the entire race, right through the night, using pit lane cameras and in-car cameras fitted with transmitters from Link Research.
Visual TV is no stranger to large RF projects; they have invested heavily in wireless camera equipment and have already covered many important news and sports events such as the Rugby World Cup and the French Route du Rhum sailing boat race.
The Le Mans 24 Hour Race is shown in most countries around the World. The race is a test of endurance. Traditionally it is also a proving ground for new technology - and 2008 was no exception.
Until now, the Le Mans 24 Hour Race had been covered using a helicopter as a relay to pick up signals from the cars and beam them back to base. For 2008, the wireless cameras and the in-car cameras relied exclusively on a Cellular Diversity network and fibre optic cables. This meant that the helicopter, which only flies in daylight hours, was only required to provide aerial coverage.
Visual TV provided full night-time coverage using Cellular Diversity. Also, with corporate entertaining becoming a major commercial activity at the race, more people want to see the drivers' views of the race from the hospitality areas, so there were live feeds to some of the teams' areas as well.
The RF equipment, the wireless transmitters, receivers and antennas were provided by Comat Metracom, the French distributor for Link Research, based in Paris. Comat Metracom specialises in RF and communications solutions for broadcast engineering and is very experienced in wireless digital video for sports and newsgathering.
The course at Le Mans is 13,629 km long and needs more than 30 fixed cameras to cover the track and the pit lanes. It is the longest race course to be covered with Link's wireless cameras so far. The race was a classic case study in Cellular Diversity. Antennas and fibre optic cables were installed around the course to provide full RF coverage of the entire race area. With these in place and tested, a live transport stream from each car is relayed instantly to the OB truck.
Seven cars, the Audi, Peugeot and one Corvette were fitted with in-car cameras and five handheld cameras covered the pit lanes. One more camera ran around, sometimes on a quad bike, to pick up events around the track.
Comat's solution included the wireless cameras that captured the full 24 hours from each car, including new transmitters (Link XPu) for the in-car cameras.
The Link XPu is designed for vehicle on-board applications. It is a pocket sized device, which can be used with an external amplifier placed close to an antenna to minimise cable loss or it can be used with an active car mount antenna. It has one SDI input, two RF outputs at 1.95 - 2.7 GHz and can multiplex in an additional ASI stream. Visual TV used the active car mount antennas. The XPu has a keypad to select profiles.
"The course at Le Mans runs through a lot of trees," says Chris Moore, Principal RF Engineer at Link Research, "and rain would make the course more difficult for the drivers, the TV crews and the RF engineers. It's also challenging to manage all the frequencies that are in use, solve the Doppler shift and channel fading of cars travelling at up to 350km/h. The crews and equipment arrived on Monday and the cars came out on Wednesday, so we only had Tuesday for the set-up. But everything went according to plan. On Saturday the pictures were clean for the warm up and it was close to perfect. We had one very minor problem, someone accidentally unplugged one of the fibre connections, but this was easily fixed."
"Link has focused its development on making it easier to get a reliable picture, in spite of weather, trees and structures in the environment," says Yves Le Moing, Technical Specialist of Comat Metracom. "One of the reasons why we got such good results is Link's COFDM-based modulation system LMS-T. It resists interference and fades and reduces sensitivity to noise and vibrations so it gives us a more robust link."
"Everyone was really ecstatic," says Stéphane Alessandri, of Visual TV. "The race went extremely well for us. We got the amount of coverage we set out to get - and we achieved what we intended to do. We were able to cover 100% of the circuit with only a couple of minor glitches. The RF links worked for the full 24 hours with no problems. It was amazing. The feedback from everybody was immense."
About Link Research
Link Research is a £15 million company with a reputation for technical innovation and an outstanding range of advanced wireless products for electronic newsgathering. It became part of the Vislink group in February 2005.
Link's broadcast contribution products use the company's own video compression and encoding technology to transit data over fast links in the challenging environment of live news and sports broadcast.
The company's low-delay wireless camera and encoding products for Standard Definition and High Definition have won many awards and are used by broadcasters worldwide. Link's distributor network spans Europe, the USA and the Asia Pacific region.
About the Vislink Group
Vislink PLC is a £100 million global technology business with companies operating in the broadcast contribution and the defence and security markets. Group companies are: Advent Communications manufacturer of satellite uplinks, Microwave Radio Communications Inc. which supplies wireless transmission links to broadcasters and governments and wireless camera system manufacturer, Link Research. The group is committed to delivering high quality video and data communications products for the most exacting remote and mobile applications.
Contacts:
Dave Remnant, Sales Director, Link Research: +44(0)1923 474 060 daver@linkres.co.uk
Anna Wood, PR and Marketing, Link Research: +44(0)20 8440 7372 . +44 7768 922 707, annaw@linkres.co.uk
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