PESA Cheetah Router Manages Video Flows at Ryerson Media School

The Global Campus Network is an international collaborative student media initiative, where students produce live programming in real-time, with virtually no latency, usingH.264-based internet systems. The network links universities in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, central Asia, the Asia-Pacific and the US.

The RTA School of Media has installed a Cheetah 128NE digital video router late in 2015 to manage audio and video signals throughout its facilities.Shawn Haswell, manager of the School’s production and facilities, said that all of the academic programs housed in the building use video at some level. The new Cheetah allows projects from any school to be routed anywhere in the building, including its internal digital signage network.

“The ability for us to join spaces together and link people and places, quickly and simply, is critical,” Shawn said. “We have been able to use the router to establish connections at a much higher level than we could before.” The RTA School of Media has three studios of its own, which are now connected through the PESA router, but also covers more than60 Ryerson athletic eventsevery year, most of which are streamed to the Web or distributed internally via digital signage. Furthermore, the Ryerson School of Journalism produces a daily newscast that is distributed through the building viadigital signage.

The Cheetah router is also a major component for the newAllan Slaight Radio Institutewithin the school, a broadcast and teaching facility intended to update the school’s radio program with equipment that reflects recent changes in the radio industry, includingautomationandvisual radio. The router manages the cameras and microphones located throughout the facility’s control rooms, interview suites and announcer booths.

Faculty, staff and students useCattrax, PESA’s system control software for Windows, to monitor and manage the Cheetah router throughout the Rogers Communication Centre. The software has a menu-driven interface that Shawn said has been straightforward for everyone to use. The engineers have found the functions that simplify the execution of a series of operations to be especially useful.Batch configurationallows selected frames or processing modules to be configured simultaneously.Save and Restorewill save the configuration of each device in the system and load it on-demand into other devices of the same type, andAuto-Restoreautomatically restores the configuration of a new card, into the frame with the previously saved configuration.

ThePESA Cheetah 128NErouter system is a modular system for HD-SDI and 3G-SDI applications with a 7 RU footprint. Inside, a single 128×128 crosspoint matrix supports I/O expansion in groups of 16. Each frame includes slots for redundant control, redundant power and direct access to hot-swap components for system architecture customisation.

The Cheetah 128NE can be configured as a partially loaded frame to accommodate field expansion. Its integratedMatrix Frame Controllermonitors the unit and automatically recognizes new I/O cards. Fibre I/O cards includesmall form-factor pluggablecages that can be configured with various modules to support legacy and digital systems. The frame supports redundant power, control and a hot-swappable crosspoint matrix. www.pesa.com