Spectecular New Years Eve with Riedel Communications in Sydney

About 1.5 million watched the fireworks at the Sydney Harbour on New Years Eve 2008. More than 100,000 individual firework effects were set off during Sydney New Year's Eve celebrations. Riedel Communications Australia Pty. Ltd. provided the communication infrastructure and was responsible for the distribution of the audio- and data-streams for the entire event. The massive task involved managing the Motorola trunk radio network and the hard wired ARTIST matrix communication in four locations. In addition, the SMPTE time code and the proprietary time code used to shoot the fireworks were also distributed through the intercom matrix.

To ensure maximum stabilty, the whole system was set up as redundant as possible, incorporating radio transceivers, analogue microwave links, analogue phones, Telestra 1k broadcast lines and ISDN circuits. The idea was to always have a backup-solution in case any system would have failed.  
One of the biggest challenges was the connection to the panel, that was situated on the summit of the bridge and provided the possibility to include Fortunato Foti of Foti’s Fireworks into the intercom matrix. The connection to the rest of the intercom matrix was established through the Riedel Headliner via wireless IP links. Other remote positions included an operator situated in the Government Coordination Centre and Government Radio Network.
„The Riedel Headliner wireless link worked really easily,“ Peter Cochrane, Riedel’s Senior Project Manager in Australia, said. The additional capacity these links provided allowed the configuration of IP phone circuits as well as 4-wire links. For this year’s event, the links were used to pass four Connect IP codecs, each carrying two AES 4-wire circuits at 22k bandwidth.
Another task was the trunk radio network within the Opera House. Riedel’s Riface duplex radios running as two semi-duplex channels, one for localized stage management and the second as a pseudo repeater for the city-wide site radio channel, provided a solution for this.
„The Opera House is one of the world’s best Faraday cages…nothing gets in or out in the RF spectrum and that can work for us or against us depending on the perspective, he added. “We made it work for us,“ Peter Cochrane explains the problem.
„It seems to grow every year as we include one or two more extra functions,” commented Peter. “I see it as an evolution over the past five years although looking back it’s quite a quantum leap to what it is now.“