Engineering - Update

Things have been progressing at a steady pace over the past few weeks. The Transmission equipment has been pulled out and reassembled on the back bench, the OB's have begun putting together system diagrams for the flyaway and the interactive team have built their server rack.

Dave (Head of Engineering), Adam (Logistics Liaison), Richard (Lines) and I went on another site visit on Jan 28th, the main reason was to investigate where the cable runs would go along with speaking again to the Matter technical staff. The main questions that had come out of the past few meetings were:

• What is the bandwidth capabilities within Matter itself, and if we needed to open up some ports who do we need to contact.
• In terms of DTT, what facilities are available and who else do we need to speak to.
• What communications facilities are currently installed, can we make use of them.
  

It turns out that the bandwidth capabilities into and out of Matter range from 2Gb - 60Gb which is perfectly suitable for pushing the live channels onto Narrowstep. However when it comes to opening up a MySQL port, so that the local database and the website database can communicate, we need to get in contact with a higher authority within the O2.

For DTT we had previously been told that there may be some existing facilities within the O2, however the Matter staff didn't know anything about this so again they suggested getting in contact with the O2.

There is already a pre-installed communications architecture within Matter, as it stands we have been given access to one of their radio channels for use on Rave Live along with another channel which can be used to contact the Matter staff directly. This is good news as it now reduces the amount of cable runs that need to be made as hard-wired comms are probably no longer required (a redundant system will still need to be looked into).

The next stage in planning for this event now relies on commissioning, the programs should be commissioned by the end of this week, meaning that next week we can meet up with the producers with Operations and begin to get some technical requirements, once we have these the flyaway and truck engineers can then implement the requirements into their plans.