A “Hail Mary” becomes a slam dunk with MuxLab’s 6G-SDI Extender over UTP

Cornell University, located in Ithaca, New York, US, has built an ambitious new football stadium at Schoellkopf Field, developed on top of a teardown of the west side stands, which alleviated all pre-run, in-conduit cabling.

While rewiring is fully planned and underway, the Athletic Communications department found itself working to accommodate camera and press box cabling for the games already scheduled. Combined with the fact that most if not all of Cornell University’s many sporting events are broadcast to the popular subscription-based Ivy League Network throughout the seasons, time was of the essence.

“We had to devise a way to use camera drops that weren’t there after our stadium underwent some improvements, which caused the older cable drops to be taken out,” said John Lukach, director of multimedia, production and web communications at Cornell University Athletics. “We found MuxLab’s 6G-SDI Extender over UTP, which is a total game changer.”

Before MuxLab entered the picture, Lukach was looking at an eight cable run (up to 75 feet each in distance,) for each Big Red football game, dropping from the press box’s video board and control room three stories high to the four cameras on the field to capture all the action.

With MuxLab’s 6G-SDI Extender over UTP (500733), he was able to eliminate the four-in/four-out cable runs and feed the press box, the various cameras and the NewTek Tricaster with just two cables total.

The MuxLab Extender streamlined all the cabling. It is unique in that it allows 4K SDI-based signal extension in various ways using UTP cable. It can send one 6G SDI, two 3G-SDI or four HD-SDI feeds at a time. Plus, no power is needed in the field because the transmitter is powered by the receiver.

“We were able to transmit four SDI feeds in high definition over just one cable with an exceptional level of visual quality. The entire system based on the MuxLab Extender gives us more capabilities on the field. We’re still running cables for every game, but our field mobility is better. We can go farther without having to kick a camera into SD because of resolution issues. We can stay in full HD for longer reaches. Plus the entire set-up is much easier. It works flawlessly for our outdoor football games and our indoor basketball games, which use a very similar set up,” added Lukach.