Jane’s Addiction at BottleRock, with PWS Antennas flanking the stage
Napa, CA (May 13, 2013)—Festivals are popping up left and right these days, and the region that knows a bit about popping corks recently got in on the action with the first annual BottleRock Napa Valley festival May 9-12. The event featured a lineup of more than 80 artists, bands and performers, including The Black Keys, The Zac Brown Band, The Shins, The Flaming Lips, Cake, Primus, Train, Jane’s Addiction and Jackson Browne, as well as more than 30 restaurateurs and 40 vintners. Close to 200,000 people attended the festival. Audio was handled by Delicate Productions (Camarillo, CA) with frequency coordination tackled by Professional Wireless Systems (Orlando, FL).
“With five stages and more than 800 frequencies for the week, pre-planning is key in helping to avoid any interference issues, allowing us to react to any potential frequency problems ahead of time,” said Jim Van Winkle, general manager of Professional Wireless Systems (PWS). “As this was the first year for the event, we tried to get as much information as possible ahead of time from the vendor, artists, engineers and media so that when our team arrived on-site, we were ahead of the game. This way, we kept any potential challenges or issues to a minimum. In addition, as with any event this size, we worked closely with the audio vendor, Delicate Productions.”
PWS was brought on to support the festival by Delicate Productions and Production Manager Chris Sorlie. One of the initial concerns in planning for the event was the close proximity to one of Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s (PG&E) power stations from the festival’s stages. “We worked closely with George Edwards and Sergey Bailleul at Delicate Productions and we all did our due diligence to ensure that there would be no frequency interference or signal issues associated with the plant.”
Four PWS staff members were on-site throughout the five-day celebration. “We stationed a dedicated frequency coordination expert at each of the three stages to mitigate any issues that may have presented themselves. In addition we regularly checked in on the other two stages,” adds Van Winkle. “We also used spectrum analyzers during the festival to determine occupied bandwidth and track interference sources, putting them on a safe frequency once we located them. An event of this size is always challenging, but once again, the PWS team did a fantastic job and the show went off as expected.”
Professional Wireless Systems
www.professionalwireless.com
Delicate Productions
www.delicate.com
BottleRock
bottlerocknapavalley.com
