Trantec S6, S6000 & S5.3 compatibility

[cedd]

I realise it's a long shot asking if anybody's done this before, but....

Has anybody successfully used a Trantec S5.3 beltpack with an S6 or S6000 receiver? Did it behave ok? I'm specifically thinking about pilot tones, battery monitoring and compander compatibility.

I've got a good stock of S5.3's across channel 38, channel 70 and channel 65. There are a few used s6 receivers going at the minute and the idea of a 2u box housing 8 receivers that'll tune across all of my transmitters is really attractive. I may also be able to add some further channel 65 beltpacks in the future.

 

In general what were people's thoughts on S6 and S6000 systems when they were current products? All I can find are lots of press releases about them being used on a number of productions, but not much technical info. They're not a commonly found unit now - was that for a reason? Was there lots of hype but then problems further down the line? I know the S5000's had really poor RF performance, whereas the S5.3's are great. Be interesting to know if the S6 and S6000 were more like an S5000 or an S5.3 inside!

 

Cheers

Chris

[Jon Wiles]

Maybe worth giving Mile at MLEC a call

[graemeftv]

jon

 

hopefully you have received your free trantec radio mic repair back now.

[Jon Wiles]

Hi Graeme

Yes thank you very much!!

 

Is there a double ear version of the single ear mic?

[cedd]

I contacted TOA direct and got a response saying that, as far as they were aware, the S5 transmitters would work with the S6 receiver although they weren't sure that frequency setting would work - thought I'd need to set the frequency manually on the beltpack to match the bank the S6 was using. It's not quite the solution I was after in the end as the attraction was the breadth of tuning available from the S6. Whilst the info online is sparse it all suggests that one unit can do a huge range of frequencies and at the time when channel 69 was dying they were marketed as "channel 38 ready". To me this implied you could switch them to channel 38 from 69 once switchover happened. This seemed a tad far-fetched judging by the huge span that included. Turns out they meant there was a variant in production ready for channel 38, but not that would also work in 69. This was one of the big attractions so I think it's a non-starter.

 

But on the subject of Graeme and Jon's post, I too received my S5.3's back from repair with ULS and was very happy with the service.