Clear-Com® Bridges Communications Gap for Spain's Canal Sur Radio

Eclipse and VoICE systems at heart of multi-station IP-based intercom system Seville, Spain/Cambridge, UK, December 4, 2008 – Clear-Com® Communication Systems, a Vitec Group brand, is helping one of Spain’s most prominent public broadcasters connect its local stations in Andalucía. Canal Sur Radio (CSR) has installed a Clear-Com Eclipse® Median Digital Matrix intercom system, along with nine 4-way VoICE interface frames, at its Seville headquarters. These are all key components of a massive IP network that provides intercom connectivity to more than 45 local and regional stations.

CSR, with the assistance of systems integrator Aicox Soluciones, installed the Clear-Com Eclipse Median at the Seville headquarters. The 64-port matrix serves 15 local stations, as well as eight regional centres comprising four stations each, along with an important regional centre in Málaga, which has a Clear-Com Eclipse PiCo matrix used by eight stations. The headquarters also include nine 4-way Clear-Com VoICE IP interface frames with another nine at the regional centres, allowing a direct intercom link between all locations and utilizing the VoICE systems as remote panels.

Prior to the Clear-Com system, CSR maintained communications between the different stations via a 4-wire-based distributed analogue intercom system. This old system had become obsolete and was rapidly approaching its capacity. CSR needed a digital intercom system that could not only handle its complex communications needs, but could also be integrated easily into an extensive corporate IP network that it had recently built to link all of its stations.

“Clear-Com seemed like the natural fit for this project,” says Jose María Alvarez, Director of the Department of Broadcast Systems, Aicox Soluciones. “CSR sees the future of the broadcast facility as being IP-based and is moving all of its systems into this realm. Clear-Com has a similar vision for its intercoms, so its solutions seemed tailor-made for CSR. The Clear-Com solution has already improved CSR’s intercom capabilities tremendously.”

“Clear-Com has long understood the economic and workflow efficiencies IP brings to the table, having pioneered some of the first IP-based intercom systems in the industry,” says Jake Dodson, Vice President of Product Management, Clear-Com Communications. “We’re proud that such a technologically innovative broadcaster as Canal Sur Radio has recognized the unique value of combining the proven reliability of our Eclipse systems with the VoICE software.”

As members of Clear-Com’s Eclipse Digital Matrix family of intercom solutions, Eclipse Median and PiCo provide a flexible and scalable foundation for point-to-point and group-based multi-connections. The Matrix family supports as few as 16 user connections on a single matrix frame or as many as 3,120 on a networked system platform. The Eclipse Median Digital Matrix supports up to 112 ports and features seven matrix slots with eight built-in interface module slots. The Eclipse PiCo, meanwhile, offers up to 32 full-duplex panel/4-wire ports and four 4-wire-only ports in a 1 RU-chassis.

Clear-Com’s VoICE intercom frame and SOFT-VoICE virtual PC panel enable users to connect multiple matrices over an IP network, significantly expanding the communication capabilities of a facility’s intercom system.