How to Cover a Cruise Ship with Wireless Microphones

Since the application environment of the wireless system is on a cruise ship, we have designed a solution to achieve seamless full coverage of the radio frequency signals in the three-layer cabin, ensuring that the wireless pockets used by any actor can be used in any one inside and outside the cabin.

China's first "drifting multi-dimensional experience drama" "Zhiyin" was built by the famous director Fan Yue and his team in two years. It is a real cruise ship with a length of 120 meters that is completely restored to the appearance of the last century and can travel freely on the Yangtze River, turned into a mobile theater. Such an innovative form of performance undoubtedly poses a major challenge to the transmission of wireless audio signals. We answered this challenge perfectly with the excellent digital audio and signal stability of the Shure ULX-D digital wireless system.

The prototype of the "Zhiyin" mobile theater came from the "Jianghua Wheel" of Wuhan Minsheng Company at the beginning of the last century. The director team required the wireless signal to cover the entire ship in all directions, and at the same time to achieve good sound quality.

Facing the special sound pickup environment, we create an immersive sound experience for the scene by utilizing the spectral efficiency of the digital wireless system, the long transmission distance and the ability to restore the audio signal without distortion in the relatively high radio frequency noise.

Since the application environment of the wireless system is on a cruise ship, we have designed a solution to achieve seamless full coverage of the radio frequency signals in the three-layer cabin, ensuring that the wireless pockets used by any actor can have a stable RF signal and a good audio signal in every corner, inside and outside the cabin. This is the first time we have done such a large-scale wireless signal coverage project on a cruise ship. The cabin is about 90 meters long and 20 meters wide. The three deck cabins cover a total area of more than 6,000 square meters. The RF cable used is about 2000 meters long.

To achieve full coverage in the cabin, we use a distributed antenna system. With such a large-scale antenna coverage, the choice of point position is actually a trade-off. It is necessary to meet the requirements that the antenna signal can cover the entire cabin, and to consider the use of feeder lines as little as possible. Even if a feeder with very low line loss is used, since the area to be covered is so large, each additional feeder will bring more losses. In the end, we carefully selected 6 points in the middle, rear and sides of the cabin on each floor to achieve a good balance between the minimum line loss and the maximum coverage area.