Small, cheap, as crappy as possible wireless

Gohanto

Gohanto

Veteran
Currently in a unique situation looking for gear options... as some of you know I'm an acoustical consultant, and one of the things we do is rate STC of doors, walls, floors, ect... (rating for how well they seal the sound from entering and/or exiting a room)

To do this test, we setup an ipod/cd player into a PA speaker to blast pink noise on a loop in one room while we go into the other room and do our measurements. Our new meters though have the ability to generate their own pink noise, so I'm looking for a small transmitter (goes onto the meter we operate and walk around with) and however big of a receiver (goes on our giant source speaker) for a 1/8" audio jack. Only dealing with 100-5000Hz pink noise, so sound quality isn't a top concern here.
Basically it needs to...
1. Strong enough signal to get through a single floor (8" concrete)
2. Cheap
3. 1/8" input or ability to adapt the input into that.

(Wires aren't an option since we need to do measurements between floors of buildings and don't have the time to deal with it)

Thanks for any suggestions.
 
To clarify, you're looking to transmit from the RTA or whatever meter you're using to a reciever on a bigass amp?

The Samson kit I've had the misfortune to use had a nice strong signal when it wasn't busy picking up UHF TV signals.

I often see the AT 700 series (looks like the ATW 701/G has a instrument-in cable) advertised for under $200, Sennheiser's Freeport lav kit might also be able to take a line input,
and Line 6 has some wireless guitar kits that might also work, some of those appear to be 1/8" in.

(For any readers not named 'Gohanto', These are absolutely not recommendations for production sound use!)
 
I think the biggest hurdle is your requirement that the signal pass between floors through 8" of concrete. Most wireless operate in the UHF band and that much concrete can effectively shield it. At the signal strngth used by wireless mic transmitters, you have to be pretty much line-of-sight.
 
I think sticking with the iPod/CD player is probably a better way to go. A cheap wireless system is just going to end up giving you headaches.
 
Gohanto said:
Currently in a unique situation looking for gear options... as some of you know I'm an acoustical consultant, and one of the things we do is rate STC of doors, walls, floors, ect... (rating for how well they seal the sound from entering and/or exiting a room)

To do this test, we setup an ipod/cd player into a PA speaker to blast pink noise on a loop in one room while we go into the other room and do our measurements. Our new meters though have the ability to generate their own pink noise, so I'm looking for a small transmitter (goes onto the meter we operate and walk around with) and however big of a receiver (goes on our giant source speaker) for a 1/8" audio jack. Only dealing with 100-5000Hz pink noise, so sound quality isn't a top concern here.
Basically it needs to...
1. Strong enough signal to get through a single floor (8" concrete)
2. Cheap
3. 1/8" input or ability to adapt the input into that.

(Wires aren't an option since we need to do measurements between floors of buildings and don't have the time to deal with it)

Thanks for any suggestions.
Click to expand...

I didn't find a path loss calculator that delt with 'buildings' and the UHF band, but the one I found for 900 Mhz, calculated a path loss of about 100 dB for a path that included 1 floor, at about 30 feet of distance. If your 'hand' transmitter is at a 100 mW power setting, the receiver would be 'seeing' a signal at about -80 dBm, and I would think that would be pretty low... this was a pretty 'quick' search and calculation so, don't shoot me if the dB values are of by 10 or 15...

I think the way you have been doing it, having the audio generator (iPod), and metering the audio 'loss' via the meter is better. Unless there are some characteristics about the noise generated by the meter device that give some advantage... but I think that would be nullified by the crappy received signal strength...
 
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