Well my first radio broadcast for ESPN Radio after my time at Radio Row this year was with The Herd in San Francisco for the Jimmy V Foundation.
This could also be the last remote radio broadcast for Colin Cowherd with ESPN, since it was announced Thursday he is officially leaving The World Leader in Sports. Listening to The Herd over the last few weeks, Colin was more than upfront about buying a house and moving to California. Rumors abound he may be headed to Fox Sports 1, but we shall see.
I digress…
The remote broadcast for the Jimmy V Cancer Foundation was held in the lobby of the UCSF Childrens Hospital in San Francisco on Wednesday, July 15th. This broadcast was different for me since ESPN ships in all their own broadcast equipment and I wasn’t using my Presonus 24.4.2 mixer. Fortunately I made a trip to the Mothership in Bristol, CT a couple of weeks ago and had a hand in rebuilding one of the remote kits. That kit was used in Cleveland for Mike and Mike for the All Star Game day broadcast.
All the remote kits are based around a Mackie 1642 with Behringer rack mixers for headphone mixes. A Zephyr ISDN and a couple of Tieline IP codecs provide connection back to the studio in Bristol. Interconnection to the TV truck feeds them 2 primary audio channels, as well as an aux mix that has the callers and commercials in it. The primary channels get sent back with the video for the ESPNU feed. The Aux feed is for the A1 in truck to hear all of what is going on during calls or commercials so they don’t think something has failed in our connections and start to panic.
A snake is run from the road case the mixer is in up to the table the talent are sitting at. Sennheiser HMD-25s are set up for the hosts. A headphone amp was attached under the table within easy reach of the main host positions. So one headphone feed through the snake to the headphone amp, and 4 mic feeds coming back to the mixer. Not my usual setup with individual headphone mixes, mic channels, and talkback channels. But this setup is enough to keep everyone happy and keeps the clutter on the table to a minimum.
The producer station has a laptop and a printer for show prep. We also set up a Studio Technologies 230 announcer talkback box with buttons for Talent, Bristol, and the TV truck. He was basically the ringmaster keeping the circus moving along to the same drum beat. He could call for audio to be played from the radio studio, call for video to be rolled on the TV side, and keep Colin up to date with times and guests.
We had two camera positions, one fixed during the entire show, the second one was a roamer getting shots of the hospital inside and out.
All in all, it was a long day, but a successful broadcast. Hopefully everyone in charge likes the way it sounded and I will be invited back for another show. Mike and Mike, College Game Day, and the SuperBowl are things I am sure I could make room in my schedule for. 😉
