Clear-Com has been a leader in the theatrical intercom market for decades, and many churches that have a need for intercom systems have turned to the company for a solution. As the live video director at Raleigh, N.C.'s Hope Community Church, who uses intercoms every week, I jumped at the chance to give Clear-Com's latest entry in the wireless intercom arena, the Tempest, a try.
Tempest works in the 2.4 GHz frequency band, and each base station—when set to its Normal Mode—can support up to five wireless belt packs. It also has Shared and Split modes, where an unlimited number of listen-only users can be supported. It can interface to most two- and four-wire intercom systems supporting Clear-Com's, Telex's and RTS's communication protocols, and is available in two-channel and four-channel models.
Need more than five wireless belt packs? Up to 10 base stations can be connected together, providing up to 50 belt packs in use simultaneously. If you need more than 50 wireless intercom systems to pull off your worship service, you're not a church—you're a theme park.
It should be noted that the system does not include headsets, which are purchased separately. This makes sense, as there are numerous headset options available, and each user's may have different preferences.
Other features include a desktop PC application for monitoring and adjusting settings on the base stations remotely, full simultaneous duplex communications on all belt packs at once, and a fascinating feature that allows a belt-pack user to trigger a contact-closure relay at the base station, to interface with external equipment. I'm not quite sure what we'd use that for, but it sounds fascinating.
In Use
Set up of the system and integrating it into our existing intercom infrastructure went without a hitch. After about five minutes, we were up and running—and most of those five minutes were spent searching for an XLR cable to connect the base station into our system.
We were very impressed with the range of the system. I was able to stay in touch with a person on the stage of our auditorium while walking through our facility, and only lost communications when reaching the far side of the facility. Audio was clear and crisp, and the system seems to have an impressive noise-suppression function, as it was easy to hear users of the system standing on stage during the band rehearsal.
The call button on the belt pack is positioned so that we had fewer “false calls” than we normally do—typically we have three to five per service using our existing system. We only had about three through our entire evaluation period. Our volunteers were a little concerned about accidental button pushes based on the accessibility of the controls, but this did not appear to be a problem.
Summary
Tempest worked very well, and would be a great addition to either add wireless capabilities to an existing system, or to be a stand-alone wireless intercom system. MSRP is $12,770 for the two-channel model with five belt packs, and $16,200 for the four-channel version with five belt packs.
As for our church, we're planning on budgeting for a set as soon as possible.
