National Mobile Television's three-trailer HD12 mobile unit made its professional debut early this year at the PGA Tour's Buick Invitational Golf Tournament in San Diego. HD12 will support CBS Sports' entire slate of PGA coverage in 2007 and beyond, as well as NCAA basketball and next season's football broadcasts. Bexel Broadcast Fiber Services designed and installed a cutting-edge fiber optic solution that delivered the high degree of interconnectivity and redundancy required between the three units.

"Each fiber within the router can hold 64 HD resources, and that means we don't have to run 64 coax cables or multi-pin connectors," says Bruce Goldfeder, CBS Sports Director of Engineering. "On the audio side, we can connect the sub-mix and main mix via MADI interface, and deliver 64 streams of audio over one coax."

Bexel's Scott Nardelli, a leading broadcast fiber engineering expert, designed and built this critical part of the project. He says, "Although the specs were complex, we devised a comprehensive solution that delivered the required 64 fiber paths between the individual trailers. There is plenty of room for bouncing signals between units, and the expanded-beam, four conductor cable we selected supports ethernet and serial data transmission." "Scott Nardelli and his team at Bexel Broadcast Fiber Services played a critical role in the design of this mobile unit," adds Goldfeder. "Their experience and resources allowed NMT to focus on constructing the individual trailer units, and everyone stayed on an aggressive timeline. Due to Bexel's top notch design and integration, the interconnects are not flaky - they are always rock solid and stable, which is a testimony to Scott's expertise."