Best practices for paddle antennas and diversity receivers?

Re: Best practices for paddle antennas and diversity receivers?

Antoon van den Oetelaar said:
Blends like mix it?
If path lengths from TX to RX antennes do differ to much I would assume to much difference in latency, so giving problems when mixed in analog audio domain.
I can imagine that with the newer digital systems they can easilier sync both.
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As Jeff said, the latency of the RF link is, for these purposes, instantaneous. As far as mixing the signals, yes. If the SN of one antenna is more than 6db better than the other then it just uses the better. But if they are within 6db of each other then they blend. The idea is that you get even better SN than simply one receiver. (The noise is random but the signals are correlated so the noise sums to +3db, the signals sum to +6db).
 
Re: Best practices for paddle antennas and diversity receivers?

So, I hope I am not the only one that read through this 5 times and thought, I really need to study this further as this thread has made me feel dumb. hah.

So, what are some good resources on RF and wireless technology and how to get the best performance out of it?
 
Re: Best practices for paddle antennas and diversity receivers?

drew gandy said:
As Jeff said, the latency of the RF link is, for these purposes, instantaneous. As far as mixing the signals, yes. If the SN of one antenna is more than 6db better than the other then it just uses the better. But if they are within 6db of each other then they blend. The idea is that you get even better SN than simply one receiver. (The noise is random but the signals are correlated so the noise sums to +3db, the signals sum to +6db).
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Well, this is a cool thing i didn't know. Thanks, Drew.

Is this a common practice across the Main Players in RF [Shure, Senn, Lector, etc.]. Or is this trick something that is only applied in certain systems? I would suspect it would not be present in the very low budget models offered by these Manufacturers and others, but i'd be curious what models this technique IS applied to.

Extra credit: Is this what is happening when i see, for instance, BOTH blue RF lights lit up on my R-series Shure receivers? It only seems to happen when the signals are very similar in strength which would be consistent with what you explained.
 
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Re: Best practices for paddle antennas and diversity receivers?

brian maddox said:
Well, this is a cool thing i didn't know. Thanks, Drew.

Is this a common practice across the Main Players in RF [Shure, Senn, Lector, etc.]. Or is this trick something that is only applied in certain systems? I would suspect it would not be present in the very low budget models offered by these Manufacturers and others, but i'd be curious what models this technique IS applied to.
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The only models that I am aware of that do this are the old UHF and the UHF-R series from Shure. But that doesn't mean that there aren't others. Shure are the only brand (of wireless) that I have looked at this closely and a lot of what I know is from the service manuals. It's kind of a shame that some of this info isn't available in the regular user manuals. I also don't know much about the digital models except that ULX-D was largely designed by a younger team than UHF-R or Axient although they did share some ideas back and forth. I guess it was sort of a digital vs analog dynamic since ULX-D and Axient were kind of developed in parallel.
One thing to keep in mind is that this blending thing requires essentially two complete radio receivers so, yeah, economy models need not apply.
Extra credit: Is this what is happening when i see, for instance, BOTH blue RF lights lit up on my R-series Shure receivers? It only seems to happen when the signals are very similar in strength which would be consistent with what you explained.
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Yes.

Arthur Skudra said:
Just so people here are aware, this is looking to be a fantastic two day workshop....I think I'll be there myself since I had to miss the last one due to schedule conflicts.

http://www.prosoundtraining.com/site/making-wireless-work-workshop/
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Yes! I attended the first one in Jan of this year and it was fantastic! I heartily recommend this. Vear, Winkler, & Stoffo (and some extras this next time) present very well together. It's a nice blend of content, humor, and anecdote. And if you aren't involved with SynAudCon already, maybe this workshop can be an introduction for you.

http://audiovidual.postach.io/post/making-wireless-work
 
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