Karting Public Address – PFI & HKRC

Karting Public Address System

Trent Valley Karting Club (TVKC) and Paul Fletcher International (PFI) is the UK’s largest karting club and the home of British karting. Based nr. Brandon and Grantham, TVKC occupies a large site with permanent, year round motor sports facilities. Comprising numerous buildings, offices, showrooms and professional servicing / engineering workshops – our client required a site wide audio system for three primary uses:

1. Event and Competition ‘Commentary’
2. Competitor and mechanics co-ordination ‘Paddock’
3. Awards, Ceremony and Hospitality

Our Audio Design

Our scope for this project was to design and install a number of audio systems to meet the client defined requirement and uses (events, competitions and Awards / Hospitality). Working directly with the track management, local facilities management team and race control officials, our audio design solutions were created and installed over a 2-3 year period. Significant improvements to local cabling infrastructures, with new cable containment and long-line speaker cabling installed.

Our design solution for this project was carefully considered. 100v line, high impedance audio was selected to provide quality audio transmission over long distances (especially for the perimeter track side commentary system). A number of licenced true diversity wireless microphone systems were installed – strategically positioned powered remote antenna used to provide long-range site wide coverage, whilst maintaining regulation radio power output.

In addition to the fixed audio systems, we also installed 3 separate wireless, radio microphone systems at this site. One system is used for driver briefing and parc ferme control, another system is used for commentary and the third system is used for hospitality and presentations. All systems were installed with remote powered antenna (full diversity) to extend range and improve audio quality, limit loss and drop-outs.

On most competition and events meetings, the site is very busy – 100’s of competitors and many more people providing support, event co-ordination and catering services. Reliability of audio service in support of many of the motoring and karting activities is hugely important. To ensure a high level of service and system availability, much of the audio system equipment was built in duplication with hot-spare redundancy – fail-over process activation by local TVKC management and racing control staff.