W-DMX Controls P5s Over 1km in Tulove Grede

	Tulove Grede. Photo: Christian Holthausen

To mark the first anniversary of the passing of Pierre Brice during Winnetou Festival 2016, a memorial service took place in Croatia at the peak of the massif Tulove Grede.

German lighting design company MBLightarts was tasked to put together a multimedia show -- they sketched the setup based on satellite images and local maps, studied some of the effects locally and took equipment and staff to Croatia during the first week of June, having had their debut on June 6.

The team took in total 34 SGM P5 RGBW washes to lit up the rocks, split in eight groups, each with a 5.2kVA generator, as there was no power supply on-site. In order to control these fixtures, MBLightarts used W-DMX from Wireless Solution -- six WhiteBox F-1 G4S transceivers were used, some with the standard 3dBi omni-directional antennas [where the distance was shorter], and the remaining with the outdoor 8/10 Dualband antenna.

"The furthest receiver was at 1km from the transmitter," said Samuel Siegel, of MBLightarts. "Using W-DMX was extremely important in this circumstance, due to the extreme terrain, long distance to the lights, and the fact that a great part of the terrain had war mines, left from the war in Yugoslavia!" The chosen desk to operate this one-of-a-kind event was a Hog4, which was positioned 800m from most of the rig.

The overall experience seemed to be quite eventful for the team -- a storm came down on the first day of fit-up [just to prove how good the IP rating of all the fixtures and transceivers was], several struggles with the tough terrain, and even an unexpected visit by a pack of wolves [which were definitely not part of the local crew!].

W-DMX is known for providing a wireless DMX link through long distances -- in areas like this, where there is practically no interference from other devices, W-DMX can provide a solid link up to 700m between devices, out of the box. Where it's necessary to go further, as MBLightarts needed, the use of directional antennas is of extreme importance, in order to concentrate the radio waves straight from the source to the destination. "The radios are built to only transmit DMX data," says Niclas Arvidsson, CEO of Wireless Solution. "Because of the low bandwidth, we are able to send data to really long distances. This is what makes us different from Zigbee, Bluetooth, or any 802.11 protocol, making our technology a lot more reliable," Arvidsson added.

Wireless Solution is distributed and supported in Germany by Lightpower.