Digital Home Thoughts: Sony UWP Wireless Microphone Package

Send and Receive

Figure 4: The body-pack transmitter.

The transmitter comes with a belt-clip to allow the pack to be easily supported on clothing (as you can see in Figure 5). The pack has a ready-fitted wire antenna and, as already mentioned, a 3.5mm socket for the microphone. The socket includes an outer screw thread so that the microphone jack is held in place and doesn't get accidentally pulled out. This is particularly useful when you consider that the microphone cable could get tugged by clothing as the person moves around, so the ability to lock the microphone onto the pack is good design.


Figure 5: The transmitter clipped onto a belt.

The body of the receiver is very similar to that of the transmitter. The main difference is that it has two antenna and two sockets on the top of the pack. One is a 3.5mm locking socket for providing the microphone input to the camera or other audio system. The other is a non-locking socket for monitoring the sound. This is a very useful feature since whatever the pack is connected to may not have its own monitoring or headphone socket.

The product comes with a 3.5mm locking plug to XLR cable for feeding the audio into an unbalanced XLR socket. For my needs, I purchased an additional 3.5mm to 3.5mm cable, with a locking plug at one end as my camcorder only has a 3.5mm microphone socket.


Figure 6: Shoe mount adapter.

As with the transmitter, the receiver has a belt clip fitted to the back. The system also comes with a shoe mount adapter that clips underneath the belt clip, as shown in Figure 6. This allows the receiver to be fitted securely to any conventional shoe mounting point. This can be seen in Figure 7, where I've attached the pack to the top of my camcorder.


Figure 7: Receiver mounted on a camcorder.

As you can see from the photo, it is possible to adjust the antenna both in angle and direction.

An alternative to mounting the pack into a shoe is to use the microphone stand adapter that is supplied with the pack. This is likely to be useful if you are using the receiver in a PA configuration.