Oh, that’s not right. Properly deployed wireless does not drop out and does not have noise hits. The original sin in this scenario is creating an antenna farm, a disorganized cluster of antennas all in close proximity or even contact with each other. This is a sure way to create a cloud of RF noise and chaotic reception patterns that will cause hot spots and cold spots throughout the venue.

Don't Buy The Antenna Farm

Instead, the effective approach is to use a single diversity pair of antennas to cover the area. (You can use multiple diversity pairs for covering multiple zones, but just one pair per zone, and use proper combining down to an A and B pair of feeds.)

At the heart of this setup, between the diversity antenna pair and the receivers, is the distribution system — or 'distro' for short. A distro is a dual RF distribution amplifier that takes a pair of antenna feeds and divides, amplifies, and buffers the RF signals out to multiple pairs of outputs (Figure 1). This is how you properly feed RF to a multi-channel system of wireless mic receivers.

Figure1

RF Venue offers three distro models: the DISTRO4, the DISTRO9 HDR, and the newest, the DISTRO5 HDR. The DISTRO4 is, at first glance, a four-way unit, with A and B inputs fanning out to outputs 1A through 4A and 1B through 4B. Each side also has an output labeled CASCADE, intended for use in cascading to another distro for feeding additional receivers. In fact, though, the CASCADE output is equivalent to the other four, so you can consider the DISTRO4 an actual five-way distro, though it has only four 12-volt ports for powering receivers.

The DISTRO9 HDR, as its name implies, is a nine-way diversity distro. A unique feature of this model is the dual A and B antenna inputs — that is, there are two A and two B inputs. A passive combiner joins each pair of dual inputs, so you can use the DISTRO9 HDR with one or two zones of diversity pair antennas, as needed.

 The DISTRO5 HDR debuted at INFOCOMM 2024. It is a five-way distro but is only a half-rack in width. You can use two in a single rack space or pair it alongside another half-rack device with the RF Venue COMBINE6 HDR transmitter combiner for IEM systems.

High Dynamic Range

You may have noticed the HDR designation in two of the distro models. It stands for high dynamic range, and it’s an important advancement in RF performance. High dynamic range is a key advancement in distro technology, helping to prevent intermodulation. The HDR models are designed to have very low noise figures and high linear headroom. This combination allows them to accommodate multiple RF signals linearly over a wide range of levels, without intermodulation. Intermodulation is particularly destructive to RF signal quality, causing audio drops, noise, and distortion — so avoiding it is crucial.

Cascading Effectively 

When we need antenna feeds for more than five or nine receivers, we can cascade distros — that is, we can use any output pair from the primary distro (the one fed directly from the antennas) to feed the input pair of another distro, which we’ll call a secondary distro. You can use any output pair from the primary distro to feed secondary distros.. For example, you can use a DISTRO5 HDR as a primary and use one of its output pairs to feed a secondary DISTRO5 HDR. This would give you nine receiver feeds — four from the primary distro and five from the secondary — in one rack space (Figure 2). You could cascade yet another DISTRO5 HDR from the primary distro to give diversity feeds to 13 receivers. Or make that one a DISTRO9 HDR instead, to feed up to 17 receivers. A DISTRO5 HDR feeding five DISTRO9 HDR units provides 45 diversity receiver feeds (Figure 3).With a DISTRO9 HDR into nine more DISTRO9 HDR distros, you would have 81 receiver channels. You can mix models to arrive at the desired number of receiver feeds.

Figure 2 

Figure3

The high-performance characteristics of the HDR distro models — primarily low noise and high linear headroom — make them especially well-suited for cascading. You can arrange the HDR models in various combinations to feed from six to 81 receivers with just one level of cascading.

Here is a list of distro combinations for any number of receivers up to 81 with both high-performance (all HDR) and standard-performance models.

With an eye toward future expandability, there is also a column showing the number of unused distro outputs that could be put to use if needed.

Operating more than 81 channels would require a second level of cascading; please consult with RF Venue applications engineers to plan an optimal second-order cascading plan.