The Hejen Racing Committee in Qatar recently commissioned a full SD/HD facility to cover the races at the racing track in Al Shahaniya. BroadcastPro ME brings you the details. No Bedouin culture is complete without its camel races, which is one of the leading sport events in the GCC. As racing is viewed across the […]
The Hejen Racing Committee in Qatar recently commissioned a full SD/HD facility to cover the races at the racing track in Al Shahaniya. BroadcastPro ME brings you the details.
No Bedouin culture is complete without its camel races, which is one of the leading sport events in the GCC.
As racing is viewed across the country, the committee decided to upgrade its existing standard definition TV station to a multi-platform facility.
This included a system that presently transmits in analogue but is DVB-T2 capable, says Belal Hamran, project manager, Salam MediaCast.
“This meant installing brand new equipment across the facility while some of the old kit was also redeployed. Besides this, a Central Apparatus Room (CAR) and gallery building have been erected next to the existing facility,” he adds.
The new project sees five fixed triax camera chains including three SD Sony BVP-500 and two SD/HD Sony HSC-300s installed around the track.
Four Vislink microwave systems are part of this project. Three will be used with vehicle-mounted cameras to follow the camels on the race track while a fourth shoulder-mounted Sony XDCAM camera with a Vislink portable microwave system that can handle both SD and HD signals has also been deployed.
As the vehicles are sometimes required to go at very high speed and also, quite far from the main 30-metre tower, the systems integrator has fixed four high gain directional antennae to cover the entire rack for microwave reception from mobile cars. The rugged link is impervious to the speed of the vehicle and the huge range that the vehicle has to travel in terms of the distance away from the tower.
In essence, nine main cameras will be used for the race coverage.
All incoming video signals will then be routed through a Snell router to various destinations within the facility.
A Sony MVS-8000G will be employed as the main vision mixer. Should this fail, the end user can manually switch to a Panacea video matrix with 16 inputs with Evertz downstream keyer.
Five VTRs have also been installed, of which four are digital betacam. These will be used to record the final output and play some archive content while the fifth supports HD.
A K2 server with four SD/HD channels I/Os will be used primarily as a slow-motion server as well as for recording and playing different clips.
Snell Sirius 64X64 3G/HD/SD video and 64X64 analogue audio is the main router.
Both the main vision mixer and emergency mixer feed a Newbury emergency changeover, which, in turn, feeds the UHF transmission system.
Two Deko1000 systems help generate graphics and animation sequences. A Chyron CG system was upgraded to HD and will be used as a backup for the two Deko systems.
Other key kit include an AURORA editing software, which helps edit recorded material; and a Trilogy commander talkback system integrated with a UHF wireless talkback system. This is the main mode of communication between the director and the cameramen while a Motorola walky-talky system is used for communicating between the different sites.
All audio sources in the new station feed into the main Soundcraft BB100 audio mixer, which has 24 stereo and 16 mono input channels. Various audio equipment including Tascam DC recorders, Digicart hard disc recorders and Telos telephone hybrid unit were installed for receiving incoming calls.
Other key kit include the Tektronix waveform monitor and Wohler units to measure and monitor video and audio signals as well as Sony and Marshall monitors; 10 DVD recorders to record simultaneous final programme output as its being transmitted; two Evertz SPG and GPS systems installed with automatic changeover as the main source for all reference signals and test signals in the station; Evertz glue cards to connect different components of the system and a 60KVA UPS system with 50 minutes backup time that can be used in case of a of power failure.
A new earth pit drilled 51 metres deep into the ground will connect all racks.
Likewise, a new UHF transmitter system from Italian manufacturer Screen Service has also been deployed. Fully redundant, this system enables an automatic changeover.
“Basically, this offers the best resilience,” explains Hamran.
“We had gone through long discussions regarding the topology and geography of the site area to determine the most beneficial gain from antenna arrangements and to accurately gauge the coverage. The system is presently used as an analogue system but is also DVB-T2 compatible. The changeover from analogue to digital can be done simply with the push of a button.”
Perhaps the biggest challenge in undertaking this project was the time frame, explains Hamran.
“We had about three-and-half months to design, procure, supply, install, test, commission and train. The second challenge was redeploying some of the old systems in the new building without interrupting the existing setup and making the transition period very smooth and transparent to the end users and viewers. The third challenge was to make sure the new system was fully hybrid and well integrated with both the SD and the HD equipment,” adds Hamran.
Presently, the Hejen racing channel is a seasonal terrestrial channel that transmits UHF channel 66. It is only operational during the racing season within Qatar. However, there are discussions about the possibility of building a small earth station to transmit the channel via satellite.
In Qatar, the annual camel racing league carries on for about eight consecutive months from September until April the next year. This year, the Hejen Racing Committee, which is responsible for organising camel races in the country, took delivery of a state-of-the-art SD/HD studio facility at the camel racing track in Al Shahaniya, which is located close to Doha. The Hejen (meaning camel) racing track accommodates races of diverse lengths from four, six, eight and ten kms.
