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Teradek Mounting


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Hey y'all!

What are your thoughts on these Teradek mounting plates?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1083689-REG/teradek_11_0761_dual_gold_mount_battery_plate.html

I find that as an operator it's difficult to deal with the Teradek transmitter on an arm. It always seems to be in the way and I like the idea of the camera being more streamlined. 

Maybe it just leads to having one more point of failure in the power? Hard to get line of sight, therefore less reliable signal? 

Let me know your thoughts!

1414151119_1083689.jpg

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As a 1st AC I'd definitely prefer something with a quick detach system vs. screwing it in to this plate to secure it and having it fairly inaccessible to access the menus or ports. Plus Teradeks can get really really hot, and turning the whole back of your camera rig into a heat sink might not be very comfy.

I picked up this smallrig quick release mounting bracket recently and it's been working well. (Amazon Link) I mainly use it to attach the receiver to my 1303 but I'm going to pick up another one to attach TX flush to the side of the camera (could also be mounted on the end of the top handle). Theoretically if I got multiples of the bottom attaching bracket, I could place them over the camera where I'll need to move the teradek (studio mode vs steadicam vs handheld etc), and then I'll be able to quickly move it around the camera without fussing with Allen wrenches or magic arms.

Then I got these white stubby antennas called Foxeer Lollipops v4. Very low profile and don't get in the way or snagged on anything, and the connection has been just as good if not better than the OEM antennas as far as I can tell. 

It's really all subjective though, you might find that you buy this and it suits you perfectly.

Edited by Nate Jones
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Nowadays with contemporary cameras getting smaller and smaller and contemporary lenses seemingly doing the opposite I typically mount microwave on the back gold/vlock plate.

The Box meridian, Wave Central AXIS, Domo Broadcast and Vaxis systems generally just go vlock to vlock. 
 

Re antennas and LOS. No difference.

At the end of the day Teradek uses a 5 way mimo with the amamon chip so even if the operators head is made out of lead it likes reflections at different polarities. 

I think Teradek makes a higher gain antenna (than the standard 5dbi omnidirectional one) at two different polarities which is hard. As the issue of going above 5dbi is they’re typically no longer omnidirectional. Which speaking from a daring experience is rather impractical especially with the janky Teradek workflow. 

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12 hours ago, Dustin Supencheck said:

@Gabriel Devereux I'm gunna be honest a lot of that went over my head lol, but I appreciate the knowledge! I obviously have a lot to learn about wireless signals. 

So you prefer mounting your wireless transmitter in this way on to the gold mount at the back of the camera? 

Thank you! 

Exactly right! 
 

Occasionally with the Bolt and Atom I stick it to the side of the camera with various attachments. But, especially with larger systems like an 85w COFDM link that’s 50% heatsink (trust me it makes the Bolt look like an ice cube) I mount it on the rear plate.

It’s where I seem to receive the least amount of complaints!

On a side note, a Bolt can ‘over heat’ however at incredibly high temperatures and the first thing that goes is the multi in HDMI to SDI board. It just becomes wildly unstable… The rest of it can withstand fire… keep in mind once upon a time the insides of a Teradek where meant for wide consumer use! 

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3 hours ago, Gabriel Devereux said:

once upon a time the insides of a Teradek where meant for wide consumer use! 

Ah, Nyrius! Mine died a while ago but served well for a while.

I have a Bolt 4K 1500 here if anyone wants me to run any tests. Can't remember how much power the transmitter pulls.

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On 8/11/2022 at 7:22 PM, Phil Rhodes said:

Ah, Nyrius! Mine died a while ago but served well for a while.

I have a Bolt 4K 1500 here if anyone wants me to run any tests. Can't remember how much power the transmitter pulls.

Even more so! A large electrical wholesaler was going to build a HDMI extender from the AMIMON chip before anyone even knew about it. 

Ah, who would've thought our 'industry revolutionary academy award winning technology' was originally intended to boost your CD player to your bedroom. 

 

I believe all the amimon chips (the full HD versions at least) pull under 15w (nothing compared to WaveCentrals COFDM 4k 85w transmitter). However,  the bolt, with genlock I believe has nearly 4-5 frames of delay.

They haven't figured out 4k yet...

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18 hours ago, Phil Rhodes said:

So where do I find this COFDM thing? As far as I was aware the Amimon tech is a QAM approach with clever allocation to minimise the impact of errors.

P

Yeah Amimon is QAM initially it was a single chip...almost dye like piece then they built a circuit to a 2way mimo for transmitter and 5-way mimo for the receiver. It isn't bad but utilises 40mhz of spectrum where was with the initial dye you could use a 4 way mimo on the transmitter and only utilise 20mhz of spectrum. 

Note AMIMON's QAM approach was clever, it's becoming somewhat dated...  as is teradek... 

With COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) there are a few different 'stages'. Cobham in the UK are the big big boys that one uses in the OB world... Domo creates a lot of RF transmission for the US, British and a few other militaries but also delved into broadcast. However, the one I've seen used the most is Wave Central RF which is more targeted towards film making.

The downside to all COFDM systems is they inherently have a HEVC x265 (or other level) of compression with that it introduces delay. The Amimon chip has 0ms of delay, or works in a realm where its about two scan lines, otherwise near unquantifiable for our means. You can get COFDM transmission with zero delay (18ms less than a frame) (Note look at Wave Central CineVue) but you're looking at 70k per transmission package. 

 

The significant benefits of COFDM transmission is, less spectrum. You can shove a fullHD transmission down 5mhz of spectrum or even less... keep in mind we can really only operate in licensed wifi channels. On a recent job I had a total of 23x Amimon based transmission systems, only 10 could be operational at a time (that's just limited by the amount of spectrum between 5.2 and 5.8) and when competing with WIFI AP's only 9 where ever stable. With each COFDM channel being 5mhz (keep in mind COFDM in itself is multiplexing across RF) you can fit a crap ton more channels down the same frequency band.

Note if you have a amimon based chip with more than 9-10 channels... congratulations your operating in 'illegal' spectrum. Which is fine as it's typically temporary deployment... but, I wouldn't go near a place that cares about RF with such a tool.

The other benefit of a utilising less spectrum is your utilising less power in emitting a broad spectrum x amount of distance. With that you just have inherently more power from the same system power and dbi antenna if that makes sense. So with a COFDM system you can go the distance in relation to Amimon. 

Last but not least the Amimon system works on a 5-way mimo in for receivers. It likes to be receiving on all 5 inputs and builds a signal on a combination of all 5. So theoretically for the best possible input you run coax from the 5 inputs and spread out each antenna about 2m a part and set them at different polarities. All COFDM systems for broadcast (as far as im aware) work on diversity antennas. 

What this means is, if I want to set up a 10-15 camera shoot the minimum amount of antennas I need to deploy is.... one singular antenna. Realistically you should set-up two for diversity so the receivers get to choose which input has a better PSNR and they like that (it helps with different polarities etc). What's also good about COFDM is you generally block down from 5ghz RF to 'LF' (a lower frequency RF between 300-1000mhz) which can run along coax and more importantly go into a DA (distribution amplifier).

Anyways that's a poorly written summary of contemporary use of COFDM transmission and its now starting to take shape in our world. 

I'm surprised it hasn't caught on like wildfire with everyone starting to do oners... I heard on the Team Deakins podcast an issue in 1917 was getting video tap across all those long shots... which surprised me! That's about a two hour job haha. If you'd like to know more Phil feel free to contact me by email (gabjol@me.com). Note... I don't work for any of these companies I'm just a keen DIT. 

Thanks

G

 

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2 hours ago, Gabriel Devereux said:

What this means is, if I want to set up a 10-15 camera shoot the minimum amount of antennas I need to deploy is.... one singular antenna

I should note this isn't advised. Generally you want to deploy two for diversity close to each other (so its in the same phase) for MRC

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On 8/14/2022 at 3:33 AM, Gabriel Devereux said:

Yeah Amimon is QAM initially it was a single chip...almost dye like piece then they built a circuit to a 2way mimo for transmitter and 5-way mimo for the receiver. It isn't bad but utilises 40mhz of spectrum where was with the initial dye you could use a 4 way mimo on the transmitter and only utilise 20mhz of spectrum. 

Note AMIMON's QAM approach was clever, it's becoming somewhat dated...  as is teradek... 

With COFDM (coded orthogonal frequency division multiplexing) there are a few different 'stages'. Cobham in the UK are the big big boys that one uses in the OB world... Domo creates a lot of RF transmission for the US, British and a few other militaries but also delved into broadcast. However, the one I've seen used the most is Wave Central RF which is more targeted towards film making.

The downside to all COFDM systems is they inherently have a HEVC x265 (or other level) of compression with that it introduces delay. The Amimon chip has 0ms of delay, or works in a realm where its about two scan lines, otherwise near unquantifiable for our means. You can get COFDM transmission with zero delay (18ms less than a frame) (Note look at Wave Central CineVue) but you're looking at 70k per transmission package. 

 

The significant benefits of COFDM transmission is, less spectrum. You can shove a fullHD transmission down 5mhz of spectrum or even less... keep in mind we can really only operate in licensed wifi channels. On a recent job I had a total of 23x Amimon based transmission systems, only 10 could be operational at a time (that's just limited by the amount of spectrum between 5.2 and 5.8) and when competing with WIFI AP's only 9 where ever stable. With each COFDM channel being 5mhz (keep in mind COFDM in itself is multiplexing across RF) you can fit a crap ton more channels down the same frequency band.

Note if you have a amimon based chip with more than 9-10 channels... congratulations your operating in 'illegal' spectrum. Which is fine as it's typically temporary deployment... but, I wouldn't go near a place that cares about RF with such a tool.

The other benefit of a utilising less spectrum is your utilising less power in emitting a broad spectrum x amount of distance. With that you just have inherently more power from the same system power and dbi antenna if that makes sense. So with a COFDM system you can go the distance in relation to Amimon. 

Last but not least the Amimon system works on a 5-way mimo in for receivers. It likes to be receiving on all 5 inputs and builds a signal on a combination of all 5. So theoretically for the best possible input you run coax from the 5 inputs and spread out each antenna about 2m a part and set them at different polarities. All COFDM systems for broadcast (as far as im aware) work on diversity antennas. 

What this means is, if I want to set up a 10-15 camera shoot the minimum amount of antennas I need to deploy is.... one singular antenna. Realistically you should set-up two for diversity so the receivers get to choose which input has a better PSNR and they like that (it helps with different polarities etc). What's also good about COFDM is you generally block down from 5ghz RF to 'LF' (a lower frequency RF between 300-1000mhz) which can run along coax and more importantly go into a DA (distribution amplifier).

Anyways that's a poorly written summary of contemporary use of COFDM transmission and its now starting to take shape in our world. 

I'm surprised it hasn't caught on like wildfire with everyone starting to do oners... I heard on the Team Deakins podcast an issue in 1917 was getting video tap across all those long shots... which surprised me! That's about a two hour job haha. If you'd like to know more Phil feel free to contact me by email (gabjol@me.com). Note... I don't work for any of these companies I'm just a keen DIT. 

Thanks

G

 

As an update on this and correcting poor terminology 

 

Quote

from 5ghz RF to 'LF' (a lower frequency RF between 300-1000mhz) which can run along coax and more importantly go into a DA (distribution amplifier).

You block down to IF 'intermittent' frequency. Which can run along coax, specifically RG1697 for 500+ feet. 

On 8/14/2022 at 3:33 AM, Gabriel Devereux said:

What this means is, if I want to set up a 10-15 camera shoot the minimum amount of antennas I need to deploy is.... one singular antenna. Realistically you should set-up two for diversity so the receivers get to choose which input has a better PSNR and they like that (it helps with different polarities etc). What's also good about COFDM is you generally block down from 5ghz RF to 'LF'

You should nearly always deploy two antennas, and an RF matrix can serve an absurd amount of of RX's

On 8/14/2022 at 3:33 AM, Gabriel Devereux said:

The downside to all COFDM systems is they inherently have a HEVC x265 (or other level) of compression with that it introduces delay. The Amimon chip has 0ms of delay, or works in a realm where its about two scan lines, otherwise near unquantifiable for our means. You can get COFDM transmission with zero delay (18ms less than a frame) (Note look at Wave Central CineVue) but you're looking at 70k per transmission package. 

Most use 264 as a compressor (realistically you have a 50Mbps bandwidth which is excessive so high density encoding like HEVC is unnecessary). 

 

COFDM is an RF style data transfer style. Amimon was initially developed to push signal from your living room to your bedroom. COFDM was developed for high-intensity high-risk (think special forces type deployments) where reliability is life or death.

The initial development I think speaks worlds. 

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