I don’t know what it’s like at your church, but at mine, we (my Audio Coordinator and myself) are constantly having to battle with frequency coordination throughout our campus. I’ve said from day one – I’ve never seen a church with so many wireless mics. Every classroom, every venue, you name it – it’s got wireless mics. This isn’t by choice – I inherited this.
Since our campus is under reconstruction, we had to move the children’s ministry from the Children’s Building over to the Education Building. When we did that, the kids’ ministry brought over their mics from their building, but they clashed with the existing mics in the E-building and canceled each other out. It has become a huge project to coordinate our campus (this involves my team, several different types of software, a scanner we just purchased, Clark ProMedia and a professional frequency coordinator from Florida who scanned our entire campus for all RF activity).
Across the street from us is a small church called Prestonwood (a church of over 20,000). People come to visit Bent Tree and everyone says, “Wow – Prestonwood is literally across the street.” Each time I say, “Yep, there it is.” We had to talk with their engineering team (yes, they have an Engineering Department) and coordinate our frequencies with each other. They had 3 professional RF guys on site when I called and were working on the same thing.
Yesterday, we learned that the 10 wireless mics we had set aside for our new kids’ theater won’t work after January ’09, due to the ongoing bidding of wireless bands. Are you guys keeping up with all this? It’s huge and the Church doesn’t even have a voice in the decision – it’s all about money and churches can’t compete with what these companies are bidding. My Audio Coordinator talked with Shure yesterday and their guy told him to not even bother with writing letters – money talks, plain and simple.
Take a look HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE for more info if this is news to you. If you are keeping up with this, I’d love to hear your thoughts, observations, plans, ideas, etc. When we ordered our new microphone package for our new worship center, I ordered a wired mic for every wireless mic. I wanted to make sure we could do everything we do – just in case. FYI – All of our new wireless mics in our new worship center are Shure UHF-Rs. How are you future-proofing your church?