One of the consequences of the growing use of technology in worship services is the increasing number of wireless audio channels needed to support them – as Wes Matthew, owner of Houston’s Puresound, a large provider of church audiovisual installations, rentals and sales can confirm: ‘Churches are going wireless with everything now,’ he reports. ‘Wireless nursery pagers, walkies, in-ears, instruments, hearing assistance, parking lot aids, security, and, of course, microphones.’

For a recent project 30 miles outside Houston, Matthew’s RF scans at the church showed the spectrum consistently full. ‘I could never find an open frequency,’ he says. ‘So I ended up picking the least crowded channel and hoped for the best.’

For this installation, each room had seven lavaliers and a handheld wireless microphone fed to Sennheiser ew 100 G3 receivers with basic whip antennas. ‘After extensive troubleshooting, no matter what we did, we were still getting signal dropouts and hit with interference,’ Matthew says. ‘We dropped the RF Spotlight on the stage, and the mics have been solid. I haven’t gotten a call in the six months since the installation.’

The RF Spotlight is designed to be placed on the floor or under a stage to optimise reception for nearby wireless microphones or IEMs, but minimise reception of unwanted devices outside of its local field. In churches, hotels and convention centers where multiple wireless systems operate simultaneously, the RF Spotlight enables wireless operators to increase the number of open frequencies available, lower transmitter power for longer battery life, and dramatically improve signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver.

‘More and more devices are competing for less and less spectrum, so we designed the RF Spotlight to deliver spectrum efficiency to any brand of wireless system,’ says Chris Regan from RF Venue. ‘We’re happy to be working with Wes and his clients to enable reliable performance under the toughest RF conditions.’