SALT LAKE CITY–CSP Mobile Productions, a provider of mobile broadcast vehicles, is installing signal distribution and control technology producer Utah Scientific’s UTAH-400/528 routing switcher into its newest outside broadcast truck.
CSP Mobile Productions covers sports and entertainment video productions for regional clients as well as networks. This is CSP's third HD truck to contain Utah Scientific’s signal distribution and control technology, and its fifth overall.
CSP's new truck, HD-2, is a 53-foot expando that will cover college basketball for ESPN beginning in November. The truck incorporates low power consumption, integrated audio processing and format flexibility.
The UTAH-400 528x528 router handles all of CSP's needs for multiple asynchronous device interface, asynchronous event scheduling and analog signal processing, in addition to providing embedded audio support.
“ESPN has issued a new requirement for vendors to support 16 channels of embedded audio, so the biggest selling point for us was the UTAH-400's ability to handle audio and video together," said Len Chase, president of CSP Mobile Productions. "The router is the backbone of any truck. We prefer Utah Scientific first because of its 10-year warranty, but also because it's a reliable product and a good value.”
The UTAH-400 is specifically designed to address the requirement for large switching systems with its ability to expand from 8 x 8 to 1152 x 1152 and beyond. The UTAH-400 is based on a matrix architecture that reduces the complexity of large systems, resulting in improvements in rack space and power requirements.
The routing switcher's embedded audio capability comes courtesy of a new line of I/O boards that rely on advanced field-programmable gate array technology to perform signal processing. Utah Scientific has signal processing built into the router's I/O board, so it can deserialize and decode a signal into its component data streams without compromising the router's overall operational reliability. Therefore, audio channels are shuffled automatically without an outboard device or manual intervention.
CSP Mobile's most recent purchase reinforces the need for compact, low-power-consumption routers in a mobile environment, as well as the need for integrated audio processing,” said Tom Harmon, president and CEO of Utah Scientific.
System integrator Little Bay Broadcasting is installing the routing switcher for CSP Mobile Productions.
