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[Jon Brunskill]

Hi all,

I'm playing (guitar and vocals) in a tribute show which currently has a mess of wireless.

We all play in other bands, and have our our own personal IEM/wireless racks, and when we play with the tribute show, we all turn up with our own racks, stack them in a pile and end up with 12ish antennas all fighting each other.

Obviously we need to invest in an antenna distro, but for now my question:

Is there a way to integrate wireless from different Sennheiser ranges, to make tuning and scanning easy?
The 500 series stuff has an RJ45 port, and you can scan and set frequencies via Sennheiser WSM. The EW100 stuff only has a RJ10 or phone port, and it seems that there is no way to connect to WSM to scan and set channels.

Currently I have to go through, scan using the onboard functions, and tune each unit, but I figure there must be a better way!

We have:
EW500 G3
EW500 G4
EW100 G4
EW300 IEM G3 x3
EW300 IEM G2 x1

Thanks

[Mark Cadwallader]

Jon, you might want to ask a moderator to move your post the the Wireless sub-forum; it might draw a better response there - lots of very experienced wireless specialists to offer their input.

[Dave Garoutte]

There is nothing inherently difficult in mixing and matching those product lines.
As long as they are in the same frequency range, and not outlawed.
The 100 has the fewest channels per group, but you don't have that many units.
Do an auto scan with the 500 to find the best group.
Use the frequencies of that group from the 100 on all of them.

[Russell Ault]

Is there a way to integrate wireless from different Sennheiser ranges, to make tuning and scanning easy?
The 500 series stuff has an RJ45 port, and you can scan and set frequencies via Sennheiser WSM. The EW100 stuff only has a RJ10 or phone port, and it seems that there is no way to connect to WSM to scan and set channels.

Currently I have to go through, scan using the onboard functions, and tune each unit, but I figure there must be a better way!

There's definitely a better way, but I'm not sure that better = easier. You're running into a couple issues here:

First, for wireless devices to work together reliably, their frequencies need to be coordinated. Using scan functions on each individual piece of equipment doesn't achieve this coordination. Using pre-set channels will, but...

Second, Sennheiser uses different frequencies for it's pre-set channels between microphones and IEMs, and between G2 and G3, and between bands (obviously), so you can't rely on that here, either.

Ultimately, you'll need to do up a proper coordination. There's plenty of information out there (and on this forum) about how to do that. In your case you can do the whole thing in WSM if you want (although obviously you'll need to hand-program the 100-series stuff to the frequencies WSM gives you).

For me, I never liked WSM very much, so if I were on your show I'd build the coordination in Shure's Wireless Workbench (using an RF Explorer for scan data), then manually copy those values over into WSM (for the 300/500 gear) or to the receiver (for 100 gear). Mostly that's just preference, but I find WWB allows for more advanced coordination tools (like keeping IEMs and microphones as far apart as possible).

Now, that being said, where better might equal easier is that, once you've built an initial frequency coordination, all you need to do at each new venue is capture new scan data and see if there are any new problems. It's entirely possible (especially outside of major centres) that you'll look at the new data and discover that you only need to tweak one or two channels, or even none at all. Sure beats re-scanning everything every time!

-Russ

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