FEATURES: COMMS
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How comms has changed F1 Riedel’s consistent drive towards remote production solutions has been a godsend for the 2020 season with limited travel ARGUABLY, NO COMPANY HAS BEEN MORE INSTRUMENTAL in the world of high-profile sporting events than German intercom manufacturer Riedel Communications, at least from an audiovisual perspective. The company is the brand of choice for many of the world’s most important events, ranging from the Olympics to Formula One, the Red Bull Air Races and even the German Bundesliga. But its work in Formula One has been a reoccurring fixture for nearly three decades. For a few avid Pro AVL MEA readers, it’s quite literally a lifetime and, for the majority of that period, the manufacturer’s team of engineers supporting communications during Grand Prix races has been steered by the head of Riedel’s Motorsports division, Dario Rossi. Having himself worked in motorsport for more than 30 years and for Riedel for eight years, Rossi has witnessed a lot of change throughout that time.
Dario Rossi, head of Riedel’s Motorsports division
Red Bull Racing team manager Jonathan Wheatley at Sakhir
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the radios were only half-duplex. That meant that you actually had to push a button to talk, the famous PTT – not something a driver would want to be operating while concentrating on the race – and each party would have to say “over” at the end of each message. When we started to build intercoms for F1, while it was quite a simple system compared to today, everything was already full-duplex. This meant you could have two people connect just like a regular telephone call, but more importantly the quality of our system was much better because of the codecs that we had developed. The best radios that we have today in 2020 are 48k, and yet our intercom solutions are 1MB. This is a huge difference and is one of the main reasons why so many teams are using our Bolero wireless intercom products. It is full-duplex with six channels, so you can talk and listen to different people and the quality is crystal clear.
How have these solutions evolved into what you deploy today?
What did the first F1 communications solutions comprise and what capabilities did it offer? Riedel first started working with Formula One 28 years ago, but at that time all we provided was a basic intercom around the pit wall. Radio in those days was mainly analogue. There was a lot of noise, distortion and interference that meant the teams would struggle to hear each other and, furthermore,
How that intro
Max Verstappen takes a practice lap
In recent years, the need for advanced technological solutions has been driven by the desire to limit the increasing amount of people located trackside. In recent seasons, we’ve been limited to only around 60 people across all teams, and so the majority of each team’s engineers are now located offsite back at their factories. The communications we do now is mainly to connect these offsite people with the guys at the track. In order to do this, we have a subsidiary in Frankfurt called Riedel Networks providing
28 PRO AVL MEA Januar y–Februar y 2021
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18/12/2020 14:49