Digital Home Thoughts: Sony UWP Wireless Microphone Package

In Use
Both the transmitter and the receiver use two AA batteries for power, as shown in Figure 8. The cover is held securely in place and you must operate a slider on the side of the casing in order to open the cover. Using standard batteries like these is a great benefit when you could find yourself running low on battery power and unable to recharge.


Figure 8: Batteries in the pack.

To use the pack, you turn the receiver on first. This allows you to ensure that you are using a free frequency - the receiver has a green RF light that turns on when it detects a signal. The unit is protected against accidental adjustment by needing you to hold the set button down for a few seconds before the pack goes into setup mode. The packs are designed to operate in a wide variety of countries, each of which has its own available frequency bands. It is therefore important to read the manual that comes with the pack in order to understand which frequencies you are allowed to use. It might have been better if the product allowed you to specify the country in some way and then lock down the frequencies available for your use.

Having found a free frequency, you can set the transmitter to suit. To do this differs from the receiver and is an additional safeguard against accidental alteration. For the transmitter, you have to press the Set button while turning the transmitter on. You can then adjust the frequency and the RF output level. The latter switches between low (5mW) and high (30mW). The low level is used if you have multiple UWP packs being used and the high level is used to provide longer distance coverage. In open air tests that I ran, the high level did extend the straight-line distance but not by as much as the 6-fold increase in power would suggest. There isn't anything in the manual to suggest how changing the power level impacts the battery life.

Speaking of battery life, a really neat feature is an accumulated battery use time indicator. Both the transmitter and receiver keep track in hours and minutes of how long they've been turned on. This timer is manually reset. The manual says that the batteries should last about six hours.

In the tests run, the sound from the microphone was clearly and cleanly transmitted to the receiver. The receiver's display shows how strong the RF signal is, so you know if you are in danger of losing the sound. The use of a squelch tone (inaudible to the end-user) means that if the signal gets too weak, the receiver cuts off the transmission, thus avoiding noise creeping into the audio.

Conclusions
The product is well designed. The packs are of plastic construction but very rigid and they have a solid feel to them. The product has definitely been designed with a view to avoiding problems caused by cables coming loose or settings getting changed.

I couldn't discern a quality difference between the microphone supplied with the pack and the ECM-77 microphone that I purchased - they both picked up the audio really well. At the end of the day, it is going to come down to aesthetics and whether or not your budget can stretch to the additional microphone.

The price for the main product is, I think, very reasonable. Wireless microphone systems have come down a lot over the last couple of years. You can get more expensive systems but you don't really get a lot more functionality. The additional microphone is quite expensive, particularly when compared to the price of the original pack, but it is a professional quality, small microphone and this is definitely an area where you get what you pay for.

Philip Colmer is an I.T. Manager for a global electronic publishing company.
In his spare time, he enjoys researching his family history, developing his videography skills and going shopping with his wife.