The Gold Coast Convention and Exhibition Centre (GCCEC) is the largest facility of its type in any Australian capital city and hosts a range of events from professional conferences to the Eurovision 2019 Australia Decides contest.

As part of its ongoing equipment life cycle plan, the GCCEC, through its supplier the Brisbane Sound Group, has deployed Shure Axient Digital radio microphone systems throughout the facility.

“Our radio mic replacement project was actually two projects that we ran in parallel,” GCCEC AV production manager Yuval Angel says.

“The first was to replace all of our roving, roadcased radio mic racks, and the second was to replace the site-wide radio mic system we use to cover the facility as a whole, including its spectrum management and networked audio distribution.”

Brisbane Sound Group sales specialist Josiah Kerridge believes that it was the best choice for the project at hand: “With the Centre needing to upgrade RF through the whole building, the high channel count, and the Gold Coast’s spectrum background, we felt that Shure Axient Digital was the only option.”

“We helped organise A/B testing against the incumbent radio mic brand, and the GCCEC staff decided that Shure Axient Digital represented a step above in both RF and sound quality. They ran a very thorough evaluation of all mic capsule options for the handheld transmitters and lapel mics for the bodypacks, which included the new Shure TwinPlex subminiature lavalier, which they’ve adopted as a premium option.”

The GCCEC has seven roving radio mics that are self-contained systems with four channels. Each of these are fitted with an AD4Q four-channel receiver, two AX2 and two AD2 handheld transmitters with SM58 mic capsules, two ADX1 and two AD1 bodypack transmitters paired with TwinPlex lavaliers, two UA874WB active directional antennas, an SBRC battery charger and AD610 ShowLink access point, which gives technicians the ability to make changes to gain, sensitivity and other parameters on the transmitters wirelessly, in real time.

At the centre of it all, an AXT600 Axient Spectrum Manager continuously scans the entire GCCEC and automatically manages frequency and interference issues not just for the two roving ADX2s. All systems are networked, and a central computer running Shure’s Wireless Workbench software sends a live scan to a screen in the AV storeroom that keeps techs updated on all RF activity in the building.

“The AXT600 Axient Spectrum Manager is the brain of our system. It is continuously scanning the building and can assign frequencies to any Shure wireless equipment we’ve connected to our AV network,” GCCEC’s Yuval explains.

“It takes the hard work out of managing RF, and is almost totally automated. We don’t need to constantly create new frequency plots when we get external parties like the media bringing in radios mics. We can make a plot in advance, and if anything is omitted or wrong, Axient Digital works around it. It’s always current and taking into account what’s in the space. When we have someone like media come in to the building that hasn’t let us know they’re using RF and what frequency they’re on, it manages it by itself.”