Having moved to progressively larger locations in Charlotte, North Carolina, after its founding in 2015, the Nikao Church added a 40-acre main campus on Charlotte’s southern outskirts that includes classrooms, offices and a sanctuary capable of seating up to 1,250 worshippers.
‘The basic structures and buildings for the south campus were there, however, they needed a full AVL system in order hold services – this was a ground-up installation,’ says Ryan ‘Fig’ Bonfiglio, Project Manager at BNY Productions, who designed and installed the system.
BNY, in turn, looked to RF Venue to ensure the new facility’s wireless systems would be reliable and dropout-free. ‘BNY has been using RF Venue for pretty much anything that employs wireless,’ Bonfiglio says. ‘It’s not that we don’t trust the wireless system manufacturer; we just really like the quality of what RF Venue provides and knowing that we’re going to have consistent performance every time.’
‘Nikao has a large worship team, with around six or seven singers every week plus instrumentalists – two or three keyboardists, guitarists, drummer,’ Bonfiglio elaborates. ‘They had a large IEM count need as well as vocal mic needs with all the singers and then pastor and host mics, online host mics, etc. We ended up deploying 14 Sennheiser ew-500 G4-935 wireless microphone systems and 13 Sennheiser ew-IEM G4 wireless in-ear monitoring systems. With any project that uses wireless mics, we always try to include antenna distribution or combination for optimal deployment in the field. It not only cleans up the racks and installations, but it gives us a known starting point on antenna placement and range.’
RF Venue’s CP Architectural Antenna & Combine8 Kit plus a second Combine8 8-channel IEM transmitter combiner and a passive 2x1Split splitter/combiner allow all of the church’s IEM transmitter RF outputs to be combined to feed a single antenna for transmission to the IEM receivers. As a bonus, it hides the circularly-polarized CP Beam Antenna in an unobtrusive low-profile housing, providing a clean install look that matches the wall colour.
BNY had the challenge at Nikao Church of having two zones of mics being used on the stage for the service while also having mics in the lobby and outside the front of the church for pre- and post-service programming. The lobby/entrance area being too far from the microphone receiver racks to run coaxial cabling without unacceptable signal attenuation, RF Venue’s Optix Series 3 two-channel RF-over-fibre optic system was used to convert the electrical antenna outputs to light waves and then back again at the receiving end (the optical signal can be run for miles without degradation). Two RF Venue Diversity Architectural Antenna & Distro9 HDR Packs were deployed to provide wireless mic signal reception and distribution. Each Diversity Architectural Antenna provides the patented cross-polarised, true diversity reception of RF Venue’s Diversity Fin Antenna in a compact housing with the same near-invisible appearance as the CP Architectural Antenna.
An RF Venue inline band-pass filter on each antenna output suppresses RF noise outside of the operating band of the wireless microphones to improve the signal-to-noise of the antenna signal delivered to the dual-zone, nine-channel Distro9 HDR antenna distribution amplifiers. The two Distro9s then deliver both the antenna outputs and DC power to the wireless microphone receivers. ‘The church loves the ability that they have to freely move around the building and have their team be flexible on where they are placed without restrictions on coverage,’ Bonfiglio says. ‘With the band-pass filters in line as well, they get good clean signals from both antennas without adding extraneous noise into the system.’
