Re: Paddles for permanent install
It's an interesting idea, with a few pitfalls. Cable length isn't is issue - this is a permanent install and you can step up a size or 2 in coax to keep losses down. But somebody patching in incompatible equipment most certainly is an issue. Between ensuring that the antenna system covers a wide enough range of frequencies, ensuring that the system won't be damaged by an IEM transmitter getting plugged into it (or into the wrong set of antennas if you put up seperate transmit and receive units), ensuring any active components have appropriate power (not provided by touring equipment, and properly isolated from any power provided by touring equipment), and the inevitable wear on the patch panel, you've got a bit of work in the system design and upkeep.
And that's without the "soft" issues. One of the reasons that touring acts like to use their own equipment is that they know what condition it is in. They know how well their gear works. Venues install gear ranges from well maintained A-list gear appropriate for the room to 20 year old B-list gear with some portion of the rig semi-functional. Unfortunately, that second group is rathe rmore common than the first. Setting up known, perhaps suboptimal, equipment is often a better choice than trying to troubleshoot a misbehaving venue system. So convincing touring acts to use the venue-provided antenna system is mostly a question of ensuring that it's clearly functional and not going to cause headaches (and that using it is easier than not).
