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Tiltamax Video Transmitter


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I have not used the wireless system, but I have used some of the other Tilta aks and to be honest, they were pretty good, I was surprised. i first noticed them on C300 packages and now they are making some pretty great stuff for the Minis and other gear.

 

As you know for rental, people are always asking for Teradek by name, but if the rental house can push the Tilta, then why not?

I have been really considering the 3000 on top of all of my other Teradek 2000 packages, but frankly I think Im going to stop investing in Teradek. I feel like Im truly spending money on the brand, not the product. Ive sent in a 2000 set 4-5 times this year. I am really looking at the Boxx Atom which has blown me away and the Slingshot, which is priced between the Teradek and the Tilta and is made by a fellow steadicam operator.

 

brett.

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I own multiple sets but they are the direct from the manufacturer version. Also have some of the 150m receivers that are small and have internal antennas for directors handheld, focus puller, etc. The difference is Tilta rehouses them. The channel dial on mine uses a tweaker which I like better. The Tilta knobs get loose. Signal is great and almost no reconnect time. They consistently beat the bolt 2000 and Tomahawks in range and signal stability. Many shows with them now and not one day of trouble or down time. I have used mine together with the Tiltas and my transmitters talk to the Tilta receivers and vice versa. Keslow bought lots of the Tiltas.

 

Grayson Grant Austin, SOC

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Which one is the direct from manufacturer version? Are they the connex kits?

 

I own multiple sets but they are the direct from the manufacturer version. Also have some of the 150m receivers that are small and have internal antennas for directors handheld, focus puller, etc. The difference is Tilta rehouses them. The channel dial on mine uses a tweaker which I like better. The Tilta knobs get loose. Signal is great and almost no reconnect time. They consistently beat the bolt 2000 and Tomahawks in range and signal stability. Many shows with them now and not one day of trouble or down time. I have used mine together with the Tiltas and my transmitters talk to the Tilta receivers and vice versa. Keslow bought lots of the Tiltas.

Grayson Grant Austin, SOC

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I own multiple sets but they are the direct from the manufacturer version. Also have some of the 150m receivers that are small and have internal antennas for directors handheld, focus puller, etc. The difference is Tilta rehouses them. The channel dial on mine uses a tweaker which I like better. The Tilta knobs get loose. Signal is great and almost no reconnect time. They consistently beat the bolt 2000 and Tomahawks in range and signal stability. Many shows with them now and not one day of trouble or down time. I have used mine together with the Tiltas and my transmitters talk to the Tilta receivers and vice versa. Keslow bought lots of the Tiltas.

 

Grayson Grant Austin, SOC

 

 

I'm wondering if they have boosted the wattage beyond legal FCC safety regulations to get better reception. Don't quite trust this Chinese sourced product. Hopefully I'm wrong.

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The Tilta (and other brand names using the same product) use broadcast firmware with DFS channels, which is illegal. I'm sure the FCC will catch wind of it some day like they did with those old illegal SD transmitters that everyone used to sell.

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To answer a couple of questions,

No, they do not use the Amimon boards. Completely different.

Mine are FCC approved and are labeled as such or I would not have purchased them. I can't speak about other companies using these boards as well but hopefully they are as well. Im sure Keslow Camera would have done their homework before buying so many of them and Tilta is a large enough company with a large enough US presence that it would not make sense for them to sell a product here and bypass FCC approval. I'm not aware that these use DFS. They are direct channel assigned by the channel knob on both transmitter and receivers. Set both to the same channel and go. 10 channels available. They have almost zero linkup time from power up and no searching. There is no pairing involved, hence He reason why mine can talk to Any of Keslow's Tiltas right out of the box. I have never heard from anyone that they use the DFS channels. Where did you see that? Please direct me to this info.

 

Grayson Grant Austin, SOC

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Hey Grayson. I believe there are only six channels available in the 5ghz band that you are allowed to use without resorting to DFS, and that's an FCC regulation. You're right that they have ten manually assignable channels, and that's what I was getting at.

 

I think it was the Modulus (I may be misremembering the brand) that was illegal back in the SD days. Abelcine used to sell them, along with some other companies. They were eventually fined and taken off the market. There is actually a really old post on this forum talking about that. I'll have to see if I can dig it up again.

 

If you have the FCC ID number printed on the device, I can look it up to see how it was tested. It's always possible that they only approved it for use with a limited number of channels.

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Just because they throw an FCC label on it does not mean it is FCC approved. That said just because they have a 10 channel dial does not mean they are all really discrete channels. They could be overlapping or using some sort of coding. Or they could be using a smaller channel width in order to achieve more channels.

 

Both Modulus and Canatrans were illegal to use in the US because the transmit power was too high. No one used the legal ones because the range sucked. Main reason Modulus got cracked down on so hard was that he was actually manufacturing them in the US and selling them to people in the US. Harder for the FCC to crack down on a Canadian company.

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Walter is right about the Pap buying receivers to grab footage. A freq scanner and a few of the more popular TX receivers and it's like they're shooting the footage themselves. That's why most reality shows with Celebs only transmit images with all the camera info on it and not clean.

I remember Real World 5 in Miami, Jan -June 96' from the balcony of the house we noticed we could see a camera feed in the big projection screen TV out on the neighbors yard. They could literally change the channel to see any of our 6 cameras, 24/7. Not a thing we could do about it. The TX were from Wexler and were black boxes with antennas, no labels of any kind, sandwiched between the BVW600 and the AB Brick and a hole at the bottom from where a cable came out to plug into the BNC out on the back....I still have headaches from that.

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Hey Grayson. I believe there are only six channels available in the 5ghz band that you are allowed to use without resorting to DFS, and that's an FCC regulation. You're right that they have ten manually assignable channels, and that's what I was getting at.

I think it was the Modulus (I may be misremembering the brand) that was illegal back in the SD days. Abelcine used to sell them, along with some other companies. They were eventually fined and taken off the market. There is actually a really old post on this forum talking about that. I'll have to see if I can dig it up again.

If you have the FCC ID number printed on the device, I can look it up to see how it was tested. It's always possible that they only approved it for use with a limited number of channels.

Hi all,

 

I'm jumping in this conversation a bit late.

Ability to transmit video signal to a further distance is directly limited by the RF bandwidth of this signal being transmitted. Wider the bandwidth of the signal, the distance it can travel is shorter. If you can reduce the bandwidth frequency of the signal you are transmitting then you can beam that same signal further away.

For example, the Boxx Meridian units were transmitting about a half of the 1.5GHz information that comes through a regular HD-SDI signal and this is commonly called "uncompressed" transmitted video signal. The Microwave bandwidth required to transmit this information was 40MHz and these 40MHz spectrums are allowed to be transmitted in various areas of 5GHz legal spectrum in North America (legal spectrum frequencies in Europe are different). The Boxx units used buffers and their Microwave RF signals were always more stable than Teradek 2000/600/300 units and needed less time to lock-in a frequency. Boxx was considered more "Broadcast Grade" as it didn't use Frequency Hopping Protocol but rather stayed locked in a preset frequency so if you are in a venue with a lot of different RF users, you can declare your 40MHz bandwidth that is pre-set to a single frequency in 5GHz spectrum where Teradek units would hop over all the frequencies available, making them inadmissible to large live events.

 

Boxx and Teradek Bolt units are considered "uncompressed", requiring a wide bandwidth to transmit the signal and reducing the distance that this signal can travel. By using signal compressions such as H264, the total amount of the information that is transmitted is reduced thus making it possible to transmit this signal miles away using the same gain on the transmitter.

Two big downsides of the units transmitting the compressed signal are an overall quality of that "compressed" video image is not as good as the quality of "uncompressed" transmitted video image and also by compressing this 1.5GHz HD-SDI signal to H264, it takes a few frames for all the mathematical calculations to be done and compression completed so if you are doing a live event with speeches, close ups of singers or similar, the compressed video image after it is transmitted and received will be slightly out of sinc with audio (due do the delay of a few frames caused by the compression).

With the new Teradek 3000 units, that so called "uncompressed" signal is being further squeezed into only 20MHz bandwidth thus allowing it to be transmitted further in a distance but without adding any time delay so these new units are still very good for live events (not looking at the frequency hopping issues). By reducing the bandwidth of each channel from 40MHz to 20Mhz, you can more than double the number of channels that the new Bolt 3000 can operate on.

If you are using Teradek 300/500/600/1000/2000 units in a same arena, the most that you can use is 4 of these at a same time. I haven't tested Bold 3000 or Boxx Atom and can't say exactly how many of these you can use, I'm planning to find out soon.

 

Another thing that affects transmitted Microwave signal's stability is the location of the frequency spectrum within wich it operates. In Europe, "legal" RF frequencies are located within 2GHz spectrum at the same time in North America it is 5GHz spectrum. Lower the frequency spectrum - better the penetration, microwave RF units operating in European "legal" spectrum will always performed better than microwaves operating in North American "legal" spectrum.

A good example for this would be the cellular service providers that are starting to provide cellular service in 700MHz where the traditional cellular frequency spectrum might be 1300MHz. If you have two identical cellphones, operating on the same network, the cellphone using 1300MHz will start losing reception as you walk into basement while the other identical cellphone will be able to receive signal 2floors below basement. Lower the frequency spectrum - better the penetration.

I'm using this example above to point that whenever you are using a Microwave unit and there are obstacles and the range is an issue, set it to the lowest possible frequency for the best results.

 

I will post some more detailed infos after I compare Tilta's units with Teradek 3000 and Boxx Atom. Hope this helps.

Also for those working on live mulicamera shoots with camera parameters controlled through RCP units, I have a great new product that provides full camera control protocol, including tally that is 1/3 weight of the lightest unit existing out there, operating in 900MHz range.

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