Shen Milsom & Wilke Hong Kong founding

Shen Milsom & Wilke Hong Kong- How it got established

By Ward Sellars

December 2021

Note: SM&W-HK has been successful due to the amazing talents and hardwork of people that came after me. At most, I just acted as a catalyst so that those people could shine and do their best work. We always must acknowledge the foresight and brilliance of Fred Shen, as he was the one who really founded this office.

Arrival in HK – Preamble to Consulting work, Campbell & Shillinglaw – 1980 to 1985

I arrived in HK in the middle of 1980, to work for a Film Production Company as a Sound Man. The job only lasted a year after which I went freelance. I met Andrew Shillinglaw and Ian Campbell in the middle of 1981 at the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, where I was available to crew on local sailing boats for Saturday afternoon races in the harbour. I wasn't a great sailor but I enjoyed it and I was energetic. I had put my name up on the bulletin board at the Club to crew for folks. Ian called me out of the blue and asked if I could come the following Saturday for a practice race. I didn’t know him from Adam at the time. We would race on his 25ft keel boat, which was part of a class called “Quarter Tonner”. This was a handicap race with many sizes of boats. We finished in the middle of the pack, just beaten to the line by his partner in crime, Dr. Andrew Shillinglaw. After the race, Ian introduced me to Andrew and as we had a few beers at the bar, they asked what I did. I told them about my film and television work and my career in the Industry in Britain, Europe and Africa. They said they could probably use my skills on a current project they had for the Brunei Broadcasting Company for a new studio complex in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. What I brought to the table was experience with recent TV production techniques, where smaller EFP electronic camera’s and semi portable recorders were being taken into the field and used to shoot television episodes like film, a single camera at a time. This technology change has a big impact on studio design, as more space is needed for editing rooms and post-production. Up until that point, TV studio’s were designed around multi-camera shooting on large sound stages. I helped C&S with this assignment, which they did pay me for, but the bulk of my payment was in training by these two men in construction techniques, especially around acoustics.

As some in the audience know, Ian and Andrew both taught at Hong Kong University (HKU) in the Architecture Dept. Ian was a Scottish Canadian Architect and Andrew was a PhD Mechanical “Building Services” Engineer, specializing in building envelope thermal issues. Both had skills and experience in Architectural and Mechanical acoustics. Ian had emigrated from Scotland to Canada in the early 60’s to work for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) as a radio and TV Studio Architect. He worked on over 30 small and large facilities across the country. At some point in the  late 60’s, the CBC was approached by the Malaysian Government for a Studio Architect to assist in the development of a new Studio Complex in Kuala Lumpur. Ian was seconded to the Malaysian Broadcasting Corporation from the CBC, for a 2 year stint. Ian loved Malaysia and SE Asia so much, that at the end of the two year contract, he didn’t want to return to Canada, instead looking around Asia for a new gig. HKU was looking for new staff, so he snapped up their offer. Andrew started at HKU as a Building Services lecturer in 1977, and joined Ian Campbell in a Professional Practice of Acoustics, based out of their HKU offices. Campbell and Shillinglaw was born, later to be joined by Leslie Lau.

I worked sporadically for C&S for a few years, always as a freelancer. They didn’t have enough work for me as a full-time position. In 1983, I started a full time job with Kam Production Studio’s (KPS) as Assistant to the Managing Director, at their offices in Causeway Bay. This was a company setting up a Home Video sale and rental business, revolving around Chinese Kung Fu movies that we had bought or licensed. I was hired to sell Chinese movie rights to overseas territories and to help set up Video rental shops in HK. But my primary role was to plan and build a small Production house in Kowloon Tong. We converted two New Territories houses into one larger facility, about 5000 sq feet in total. We had PAL and NTSC C-Format 1” recorders, PAL and NTSC U-Matics, a big VHS and Beta duplication bay, a Rank Cintel Telecine, a small shooting stage of about 1000 sq.ft, and a Master control room with all Ampex cameras and switching equipment. We even had a digital Standards Converter, which was very costly at the time. I also built an audio post studio, with a 32 track Soundcraft console and a 24 track Studer recorder time-code synced to a U-matic Video recorder, so that we could do rock-and-roll mixing and editing. The Audio studio was small at about 250 sq ft, but it was big enough to record jingles or a small group. Primarily we used the studio for audio post work on in-house and external projects.

I was in a position to hire C&S as acoustical consultants for the studio, and I learned a lot about how consultants work and how to detail construction for acoustical purposes. All the TV Studio’s (RTHK, TVB, ATV) were in the Kowloon Tong area, even though we were all under the Kai Tak flight path. We wanted the shooting stage to be NC 20, but the best we could do was NC-30 with the MVAC & the airplanes overhead. The small audio studio target was NC-15, but the best we could do was NC-25 and even that was very difficult as it was on the top floor of the building . We used audio techniques like close miking, noise gates and downward expanders to increase the available dynamic range. It was during the design and construction of this studio that I met and became friends with David Burgess of Audio Consultants Company Ltd. (ACCL) He was the dealer that sold us all of the audio equipment for the studio.

Independent Acoustical and Sound System Consulting Work, Teaching – 1985 and 1986

I left KPS in 1985 when they were starting to have financial difficulties. C&S offered me a freelance gig to do the Sound System/Audio design (Electro-Acoustics) for the new Garden Hotel in Guangzhou. See my on-line blog about this here. They had been using Jacek Figwer out of the States for their electro-acoustic design work, but they felt I would be just as good (and cheaper). Jacek had been the Sound System design guy for Bolt Beranek and Newman in Boston (now Acentech), before setting up his own practice. I looked through some of his sound reinforcement designs, and although solid, I thought they were pretty old-fashioned. I did the research on products via trade magazines, hard copy brochures (nothing on-line yet) and via the sound system products sold at ACCL and its competitors. This often meant getting on a bus or the newly opened MTR to visit showrooms and see the actual gear first hand. Sometimes I would call the manufacturers in the UK or the US and get them to mail me information or occasionally a fax (remember them?). When I was at ACCL reviewing their line of Electro-Voice and Altec Lansing products, I was intrigued by a draftsman using a program called AutoCAD, outputting onto a pen plotter. I think this was AutoCAD 2.1, running under DOS. I asked Dave Burgess if I could hire this guy to draft up my one-line schematics for the Garden Hotel. He said he could make him available for free if I spec’d EV and other ACCL products! That was a good deal, because EV and Altec were a great line of products at that time, and I was likely to use them anyway.

It was during this time that Andrew and Ian got me to stand in for them in some of their classes at HKU, as they were always travelling for their private practice. I had picked up enough formal acoustics knowledge and read voraciously, so that I could teach some classes in Noise Control to Architecture and Building Services engineering students. My preferred textbook that I used for the courses was Parkin, Humpreys and Cowell, “Acoustics, Noise and Buildings”. This inexpensive paper back is technical enough to be a textbook, but it is well written and accessible by almost any level of student. This excellent book has been out of print for some time. I ended up teaching two terms of students and was even an examiner.

The big difference between my sound reinforcement designs and Jacek’s was in the use of Automatic Microphone Mixers and balanced audio interconnections without transformers. Jacek’s designs used big console analogue audio mixers and transformers everywhere. Although I do use audio transformers in some circumstances (nod to Bill Whitlock), if attention to proper grounding and balanced shielded operation is maintained in a fixed domain facility, the chances of spurious noise induced into the system is pretty limited. Direct balanced coupling of low-Z outputs to hi-Z inputs will provide the best transient response – better than with transformers. I would also use 600W amplifiers, which have a direct peak to peak voltage swing of 70V, so that we can couple these directly to a 70V line, without an output transformer on the Amp. If we needed more distance, we would use a 1,200W amp, coupled into a 100V line, again without transformers. Transformers on the outputs of amplifiers are big, heavy and most importantly, they rob the system of low Hz transients. Things are much simpler now when we go straight to digital at the mic XLR jack, or even right in the mic, with Dante output from the Mic on an RJ-45.

Although I did use a modest size console mixer for the Hotel large divisible Ballroom (about 15,000 sq.ft), the primary microphone control was with the Altec Automixer’s, which had been patented by Dan Duggan and licensed to Altec. These were a gain sharing design that worked reasonably well . Even today, the Duggan Automixers, in software, are the best mixing algorithms’ on the market and much imitated. The next best Automixer algorithm in my view is the Bob Ponto patent, that IED used.

Jockey Club, Peter Barnett and large Computer controlled sound systems – 1986-1989

After the Garden Hotel project finished in early 1986, Dave Burgess introduced me to Peter Barnett of AMS Acoustics. Peter had a contract with the Jockey Club for the complete overhaul of the Happy Valley PA system. Peter was based in the UK and travelled to HK from time to time, but he needed someone on the ground. So he hired me, initially on an hourly freelance basis, and then later full-time. Peter was an expert in Intelligibility, and he had written numerous papers on the topic for the Institute of Acoustics in the UK. He had made an outrageous claim to the Jockey Club that he could design a PA system that could deliver totally intelligible live race commentary to every one of the 45, 000 punters as they were screaming for their favourite horse. Because of his Academic and Mathematical credentials, the Jockey Club took him up on his challenge and gave him a contract to totally replace the sound systems at Happy Valley. I came into the project when he was about 60% finished with the design, and initially I performed lots of in-situ SPL tests at many different parts of the Happy Valley track during race meetings. We found that there was about a 20dBA difference in the ambient SPL from the beginning of the race to the end of the race. The members private boxes didn’t vary that much, about 12dBA, but the public stands became very raucous during the races. So we knew that we needed a system that would automatically adjust the SPL level to always be 10dB above the ambient and rise and fall as the ambient changes. Since different areas had different minima and maxima, we also knew that we needed many zones of sensors. In the end, we ended up with 3000 speakers, 160 speaker zones, and 40 different sensor locations. Everything had to be hands off, controlled via sensors and algorithms, with separate routing for English and Cantonese race commentary. This was absolutely revolutionary for 1986, where everything ran under DOS! At the time, in 1986, there was only one manufacturer that had this capability and that was IED. The project at Happy Valley was installed by ACCL during the summer 1986 closed season and was operational in September when racing started again. We needed to be on hand for multiple Wednesday night race meetings to attend to anomalies, and to re-program parts of the system that didn’t work exactly as we had expected. By December of 1986, the system was deemed to be stable and we did final hand-off. The Club loved the audio performance and it delivered on Peter’s promise, Intelligibility everywhere.

Immediately the Jockey Club signed up Peter for a complete revamp of the Sound System at ShaTin, and I came along for the ride. This IED system was even larger, almost 5000 speakers, 185 output zones (each with a 1,200W amplifier driving 100V lines).Although ShaTin is larger than Happy Valley, at 90,000 patrons, it needed fewer sensor locations as there weren’t so many small spaces like at Happy Valley. We had 30 sensor locations in ShaTin. This system was designed over the 1987/88 winter and was installed by ACCL again in the summer closed season of 1988. It was commissioned in September of 1988.

Peter Barnett was a typical Type A personality, hard driving, hard drinking, overweight, smoker, so his health was not that good, especially his heart. There were periods of time when he couldn’t travel to HK and I was handling everything, along with a couple of dedicated commissioning guys we hired. Peter gained another contract for the Macau Jockey club in 1987, which we started before ShaTin was finished. Macau races through the summer so the stands are enclosed and air-conditioned, with lots of glass – a very difficult situation due to the acoustical reflections off the glass. But this project was easier as it is much smaller than either Happy Valley or ShaTin. However, we needed to handle 4 languages simultaneously – English, Cantonese, Portuguese and Mandarin. We used the IED digital stacker to schedule announcements in public areas. In the private boxes, the punters could select which language they wanted to listen to. Late in 1988 during the Macau Installation, Peter had a massive heart attack while he was in HK, and he almost died on the operating table. He had a quadruple bypass at Mathilda Hospital in Hong Kong. Although he slowly recovered, I could see that I could not pin my future on this guy, so I needed to find another job.

Relocating to the US - 1988?

Earlier in 1988, I was already considering moving back to the US. I had by this time been living outside the US for 14 years. I put together a 100 page CV, complete with drawings, calculations and reports. I sent it out by mail to 20 different Acoustics/AV consulting firms in the US, with the intention on visiting these firms in the summer of 1988. The list was all the big names in the Consulting field, like Salter Associates and Paoletti in San Francisco, Veneklausen in LA, Towne Richards in Seattle, Bolt Beranek in Boston, Joiner Rose in Dallas, Kirkegaard in Chicago and many others. I actually got replies from ten of these firms that they would like to meet me. In the summer of 1988, I flew to the USA and visited 8 cities where consultants were based, seeing 12 firms in total. Although I had interviews at 2 firms in NYC, I didn’t know about Shen at this time as they were pretty small. So I left the states without meeting Fred, Dennis and Hubert Wilke. I got two job offers out of that trip, but I was not sold on either of them. After I got back to HK, I found out about SM&W and sent my CV to them. 2 weeks later I got a call from Fred. I told him about my recent trip to the states and that I was considering coming back to the US.

Fred had another plan for me.

He said that he had long thought about opening an office in Hong Kong, where he had gone to school, but he didn’t know anyone that could manage a new office like that. So he said he would like to meet me. He sent me a ticket to NYC and I flew back there for 4 days near the end of 1988. It was a whirlwind trip, meeting all of the then 20 employees and partners. They made me an offer to stay in Hong Kong and it was a good offer and a good plan. So we shook hands and parted. I told them that I had multiple existing commitments in HK and could not start full time with them until the end of 1989, about 1 year later. In the meantime, I would work on a hourly basis to get the office organized. They printed name cards for me and I followed up for them on some existing projects in HK, like at the IM Pei Bank of China building. I also made some trips to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur to meet with potential clients during this time.

Transition to SM&W – 1988 & 1989.

In late 1988, I took a lease on a small office/residential space at 46 Graham Street in Central, near Hollywood Road. This space had been purchased by a friend of mine as an investment. We knocked a few flimsy walls down to make one large open space of about 500 sq.ft. We built some movable acoustical panels about 5 ft high as cubicle barriers, with work space for 5 people, plus office equipment, a small kitchen and bathroom . This became the first office for SM&W in HK.

In the summer of 1989, I had a business class ticket around the world, on United and British Airways (they were partners then). I would go to Seattle, then LA, then NYC, then London, then Paris and lastly Delhi before returning to HK. I had business in all these places, but Paris was primarily a personal visit as my mother was living there at the time. But because I was going to be in Paris, Fred wanted me to check out the Ritz Hotel, stay one night and find out everything I could about the room controls that were installed there. SM&W-NYC was then working on the Hotel de las Arts in Barcelona, an SOM hotel being built for the 1992 Olympic games. The owner of that Barcelona property loved the room controls at the Ritz and he said to Fred “I want something like that in my property”. So I stayed at the cheapest room ($450/night, which is like $1200/night today) and took apart the bedside control panel to see how it was made. Like most things French, it was a beautiful custom job that would be difficult to replicate. I did visit the manufacturer in the suburbs of Paris and tried out my imperfect French with them, but it was not the right solution for the Barcelona hotel. It ended up Crestron (surprise), not as beautiful but more reliable.

It was during this trip that I had two other memorable experiences. While I was visiting relatives in Seattle, I made a side trip to Vancouver BC to spend time with Charlie Richmond of Richmond Sound Design. Charlie was (and still is) a theatre sound guy. But he had developed an intriguing audio automation system that he was just starting to sell to Theme parks. My visit there was to try to get him interested in developing a competitor product to IED. Although we had been successful with three mammoth installations of IED, we knew they needed competition to keep them innovating and to have some other options. Charlie knew a lot about the IED system, but he said he just could not devote the resources to compete with them. He was happy to stay in his Midi Show Control/Theatre automation niche. Today he has a powerful audio automation server that is entirely software based. In many ways it pre-dated the QSYS software based DSP, but it is time-line and cue based, which is what you need for Theatre and Theme Parks.

The other memorable experience was related to flying. When I arrived at JFK to board my flight to London, the BA gate agent looked horrified and said that I had been bumped off the flight. She could also see in her computer record that I had twice re-confirmed the flight. They realized that this was their mistake, so she offered me an alternative upgrade flight at their expense – on Concorde. So I got the ultimate upgrade that isn’t available any longer. My seat mate was Gordon Richardson, the Governor of the Bank of England, whose name was on all the Pound notes. Flying across the Atlantic at 70,000 ft at Mach 2 was an incredible experience.

Finally, at the end of 1989, I had wrapped up all my non-SM&W commitments and was ready for the roller coaster ride of my life. In early January of 1990, Fred sent me to NYC for a 3 month stay to absorb the SM&W way of doing things. He put me up in a nice bachelor apartment about 20 minutes walk from the SM&W office, then at 39th street, between Park and 5th Avenue. I was employee number 21. Tommy was 15 years old and he would come into the office from time to time and shout to Irene “Mom, where are my gloves” or some other kid thing. They threw me into projects immediately, including Sound System schematic design for the new Denver International Airport. I absorbed a lot of lessons from the senior staff there at that time, especially from Ben Houghton and Jim Merrill on the Acoustics side and John Campanella for AV.

After that 3 months, I returned to Hong Kong to begin 13 years of non-stop work at SM&W HK and then in SF at SM&W-SF.

I hope to read the amazing stories of current and former SM&W-HK staff, to see where they have ventured and succeeded.

Audiovisual Systems Planning and Design

Audiovisual over IP – Ward is a subject matter expert on this, presenting a well-attended lecture at the BICSI fall conference in San Antonio in September 2018.

Although this looks to be an AV thing, it is really a network application of low buffering network architectures in order to support real time streaming media. Although AV over IP is at its core just standard Ethernet, the implementations are all requiring a Software Defined Networking (SDN) Controller overlay.  

All of our five star hotel work depends on networking video and audio over Ethernet, usually Dante for Audio and Crestron NVX for Video. Security camera video is typically standard H.264 or H.265 multicast streams. These worlds are quickly colliding – Audinate announced Dante for Video in June 2019 and Crestron announced embedded Dante Audio networking within their NVX Video architecture at Infocomm 2019. Although the AV vendors don’t really use the term, many of their implementations are compliant with SMPTE ST 2110, which is extensively detailed in Wards media presentation linked above.  The idea is that dis-aggregated essence streams are sent out over the network and synchronized with IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol (PTP).   

Our recent design work for the large Video Wall at Suncor’s Global Security Operations Centre (GSOC) in Calgary is a case in point. We have implemented a video processing environment that is chassis based, but the inputs and outputs of the video wall are all networked AV over IP endpoints. The Calgary system is compliant with the Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE) Alliance, which provides interoperability at various network speeds.

Audiovisual Systems – This is a catch-all term for the corporate and education AV that we do regularly

AV is the hardest discipline to make money at because the projects vary so much from one client and project to the next.  Every job ends up being unique, and senior time is needed to distill the client’s vague requirements into real systems.  AV equipment is also constantly changing, so a solution that we used last year may not even be available this year.  R&D is necessary for every project, along with extensive interviews with user groups. 

Although we have lots of CAD blocks of devices and techniques to get things done, the client requirements drive the systems. A 500 sq. foot room could have $5,000 of AV in there or it could have $100,000 of AV, depending on the client/user requirements. It is therefore impossible to quote AV on a per sq. foot basis, but instead we need to write up what we call a “Phantom Design”. This is a narrative description of the systems that we understand or assume will be placed into the various spaces. This usually takes Ward from 15 minutes to 2 hours to write this up and it is included in the Fee Proposal under “Scope of Work”. Extremely rarely does an RFP include detailed descriptions of the level of AV that the client requests.

Ward started working for Shen Milsom & Wilke Inc., out of New York City in 1989, when there were 21 employees in one office (SM&W now has 260 employees in 15 offices).  He spent 3 months in New York at the head office, in order to learn the SM&W ‘method’, going back to Hong Kong in 1990 to open the branch office there.  At that time Ward was doing Audiovisual and Acoustics, as SM&W was first and foremost an Acoustics consultant.  See below on Acoustics knowledge. For the next 3 years Ward did Acoustics and AV.  

In 1993, at our annual company ‘off-site’ meetings, Ward was told by Fred Shen that he needed to learn Telecommunications and Networking, as AV was moving in this direction, and that it was a profitable discipline in itself. Ward continued to do Acoustics and AV work right up through leaving SM&W in 2003, although Telecom occupied about half of his billable time.

First project in China in 1985 - Chinese contracting style

Electro-Acoustics on Projects in China, circa 1985

It was in 1985 that Ward did a big audio engineering job for Campbell & Shillinglaw at the new 900 room Garden Hotel in Guangzhou (Canton), which has a huge ballroom and many meeting rooms. This would be the first of many hotels that Ward would work on. This was a period very early in the opening up of China to the outside world. You needed to get a special visa to visit each city and use special money called Foreign Exchange Certificates that looked just like Monopoly money. There were armed police everywhere ‘checking your papers’, like those movies about East Germany and Russia. It was December 1985, and rather cold in Canton, probably 5 deg C, and the air was super thick with coal dust as every house and business cooked (and heated) with soft coal. Ward travelled by train to Guangzhou to present the finished design to the Chief Architect of the Guangzhou Design Institute, since all architectural work was state owned. This was the official architectural firm for the Hotel. Ward was invited to visit the site office to meet the Chief Architect and present the audio designs (there wasn’t really any video at this time besides regular TV’s), on rolled up blueprints. The site office was huge and the Chief Architects office was a massive suite of rooms, including a 1000 sq. foot office with many sofa’s and a large table. The Chief Architect was alone in the room and he invited me to sit at one of the sofa’s and an attendant quietly brought tea. He sat opposite me in a casual arrangement that I thought was odd. He was about 55 years old, greying hair and he spoke impeccable English. He said he had been trained in Shanghai in Jesuit schools and he obviously came from a well-connected family. He said he had done some of his Architectural studies in the UK and he had a slight British accent, although he wore the Mao suit and a Communist Party pin on his lapel. I was a little surprised that we were alone in the room, the reason’s becoming clear as we talked. He opened the roll of drawings, and I also gave him a diskette of the AutoCAD files. He had some technical questions about the mounting methods of some large speakers above the ceiling of the ballroom and some other questions that showed he was a skilled builder. I answered the questions as thoroughly as I could. He listened quietly, then put the drawings down and started talking about his life. He said that he was the Chief of the Guangzhou Design Bureau and he had 2000 architects, drafters and designers working for him. He said he had a car and a driver and that his children went to special schools, that he implied were only available to valuable party members. He then said that he earned US$250 per month from his job and that most of his staff earned less than $100 per month. He said that this was not enough to provide for books and medicines for his kids or for special foods or even imported cigarettes, and that he had to earn money outside of his regular job. Then he boldly said that he liked our design drawings but the work would not be competitively bid in the way I was used to. Instead, the work would be awarded to the contractor that gave them the biggest cash kick-back. He said, point blank, that his entire office was on the take, and that was how things worked in China. I guess he was trying to educate a naive ‘Gweilo’ (“White Devil”). He was ashamed of this, and said that this kind of corruption was not sustainable in the long run and that it would corrode the very soul of the country, however, it was how things were done. He longed for a time when he and his staff would be paid what they were worth and he wouldn’t have to depend on graft and corruption to have a few necessities of life. After a few minutes I left, but the whole episode was imprinted in my memory. Although my later work at SM&W would involve doing work in mainland China, I left all of these types of interactions to my local HK Chinese staff, as they knew the landscape and how to navigate it.

Technical Writing

Writing of Custom Reports:

There are too few people at  Engineering firms that are able to look at a blank white page, and within only a few hours fill it up with pithy, reasoned, accurate and compelling prose.  Most Engineering staff say they don’t know what to write unless they have a previous report that they can edit. All senior staff members should have reasonable writing skills but this expectation is not realized in practice.   It is important to be able to write well and express ourselves. That is worth more than almost any other skill.  The only other skill that we rate higher is the ability to walk into a meeting of 20 hardboiled construction and design professionals and have complete command of the questions and issues at hand, without fearing for the consequences.  Confidence, prior preparation and Chutzpah are key lubricants to getting things agreed to in meetings.  

Often, there isn’t a template for the reports that we need to write, especially for our Low Voltage disciplines.  A design brief or outline spec is useful for general building Telecom or Security networks but they are not useful in many other of our situations.  Often we need to write something that is unique that sparks the clients curiosity as well as illuminating a specific solution to an identified challenge. 

Ward preaches the practice of providing clear and unambiguous recommendations with one preferred solution and perhaps one alternate solution. Occasionally we need a document that has another objective, which is to suggest multiple scenario’s or technology paths, to spark discussion and eventual agreement on the preferred path.  These types of reports usually have no template or structure imposed previously, as the subjects are all rather unique.

Writing of White Papers:

If we are to get work in these differentiated sectors, we must let people know what we know.  Ward does that by writing up articles for publication and presenting at conferences. But he also spends time crafting project descriptions on existing projects that are filled with benefit language and ‘overcoming-challenges’ language.  These are the things that people are looking for us to do – to help them overcome their challenges.  

Partly Ward’s interest in this field is his love of teaching others what he knows.  He’s had three periods of work as a teacher and lecturer in Tertiary education. The first was at City College of the City University of New York, where he taught in the Picker Film Institute and also a Film Animation course in the Art department.  While in Hong Kong, he had two stints of teaching – he taught Building Services Acoustics (and was an examiner) in the Architecture Department at the University of Hong Kong and he also taught Field Sound Recording courses at the Hong Kong Academy of Performing arts.  Fred Shen, Ward’s former boss at SM&W used to say “Ask Ward a question and you get a Novel”.

Writing Proposals to Win

We are big believer’s in the PSMJ camp of writing proposals to WIN! Crafting a compelling persuasive proposal is not easy and it takes commitment and focus to make sure all of the pieces are as benefit and client and RFP focused as we can make it. We do use a proposal template, but it is highly customized to the opportunity. 

The cover letter is often written from whole cloth, although sometimes we will take a good previous cover letter for the same project type, and modify it to be super precise and targeted. We obsess over small details - choice of photos, fonts, CV and reference project accuracy, spell checking, and of course the fees and costs.  

Very often Ward is writing proposals for Comms, Security and Audiovisual. Our Hotel proposals usually have a lot of travel that is required, so we have developed various spreadsheet costing and analysis tools to determine the fees and costs. The Hotel proposals all require a breakdown of reimbursable expenses by discipline and phase, for a project that will have a minimum 4-year time frame, which often stretches out to 6+ years.

Although it is a necessary evil, responding to public procurement RFP’s is a sure-fire race to the bottom, where we do not have the legal space to differentiate ourselves.

Additional Service Requests (ASR’s):

This is the easiest new work to get - as long as the client likes us!  On a number of our larger jobs, ASR’s sometimes represent 50% (or more) incremental revenue on the base job.  The important aspect of this is to make ourselves indispensable and valuable to the Client so that they realize the value.  The ability to sell ASR’s is just as important as selling any new work – it must be benefit and value based.

As we all know, it is 7 times harder to get work from a new client than from an existing one.  

PBX & Voice Systems

Ward was involved with three large PBX designs and installations at Convention centres in Hong Kong and Singapore and also at a large mixed-use development in Dubai. In 2013/2014, Ward developed and ran an IP-PBX tender for the Government of Jamaica in upgrading the local and island wide voice networks for the Airport Authority. This included the main airport in Kingston and WAN links to 4 more airports across the island nation . Ward understands all the minutiae of voice feature builds, most of which today are software based.  However, the features that are supported and implemented today in software must be accurately described and documented, especially in the submissions, as each manufacturer feature set is different.

Although everyone today depends on their cell phone, there are still many critical business and life-safety implications of PBX and Voice System design. For example, we need to implement E911 functionality into these systems, especially in hotels. Enhanced 911 functionality maps a specific room to the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).  In this way a guest in distress just needs to pick up the phone and dial 911 and the call goes to the PSAP with the Hotel address and the room number.  

Another engineered feature is Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) which is used for the Operator/Agent pool to deliver skills-based routing.  We often need to deliver a dialplan for over 1000 voice terminals at each Hotel.

Wireless Systems Design

Microwave and Radio link planning

Ward had a commercial FCC broadcasting license at the age of 18, in Los Angeles. There are very specialized individuals and firms that also do this work, and sometimes we partner with them for a specific application, but Ward has an array of planning tools to calculate link loses and effects of Fresnel zone attenuation.  

One time at a previous company, we had a project in Las Vegas, where we were assisting the Fire Department with improving heart attack survival rates. There are quite a few heart attacks on the streets of Las Vegas, where people get overwhelmed with the heat and the distances.  A response to a heart attack is crucial in the seconds after a victim is discovered.  We helped develop an ECG 12-lead radio link, with helmet mounted video camera so that a first responder can place the ECG leads on the victims chest within a few seconds and start beaming a live video link to the hospital, where a Cardiologist will tell the EMS team exactly the right triage treatment, even before the victim is moved.  In this case, we teamed with an old high school buddy of Wards, who is a PhD radio systems engineer.  His day job is bouncing radar signals off Jupiter for an unnamed government agency.   In the end, we implemented a semi-custom rig in an EMS fanny-pack which utilized a COFDM transmitter that was immune to multi-path distortion and attenuation. The video signal sent to the hospital had the video cam image of the patients face and eyes, with the live ECG graph overlaid on the video image.

This project was done in 2000, before high speed cellular service was available. Today it could be done with linked Cellular services from multiple service providers using a cellular router from a company like Pepwave. These devices take multiple SIM cards (up to 8 services) from different carriers and aggregate the bandwidth into a fat data stream. But even knowing this piece of technology trivia is a differentiator, as few people are aware of these product developments.

PTT Radio Design and Commissioning – Push to Talk (PTT) Radios or Walkie-Talkies, are still an important and valuable tool for building operators, especially for Engineering and Security teams. The radios are extremely sensitive and can work in deep sub-basements where other devices cannot and they do not depend on any network or power infrastructure to work.  We are familiar with and can adapt to technologies such as Digital TDMA, Digital FDMA, DECT, TETRA (mostly Europe), APCO 25 and analogue systems, in VHF, UHF and 800MHz bands.

Wi-Fi System Planning and Design – quite different from our competitors.   The 3D simulations are described below.  Ward does strategic consulting for Wi-Fi, where the process of upgrading a facilities infrastructure can have major operational implications.

A good example of a completed project of this type was for Saint Mary’s University in Halifax. In this case the University had implemented Wi-Fi over many years in an ad-hoc fashion, adding access points as and when they had the money and some time to install them.  What we did for them was to analyze their entire campus system and find out where the holes were.  But we also helped them to write a public RFP, where all the major vendors, in this case HPE Aruba, Cisco and Ruckus, would have an opportunity to bid on the wholesale replacement of the Wi-Fi system for the entire campus.  Our work finished at the review of the RFP responses and recommendations for a vendor.  We did an ibWave 3D simulation of their new hockey arena which was in the early stages of design. Their existing Ekahau Wi-Fi planner software could not handle the tiered seating of the arena, which our tool can do. SMU were very pleased with the overall work we did and they sent us a note saying such.  St Mary’s wrote in an email to us, in part “We are extremely pleased with our relationship and the service provided…”

Real Time Location Systems – RTLS – In the early 2000’s, RTLS was Wi-Fi based, but the triangulation to determine ones position was not very accurate or repeatable. A few specialist companies began work on more accurate RTLS systems that could reliably and positively identify the individual room that the person or asset was based. The accuracy and reliability have increased to the point where location accuracy is within a few metres.

The only building type where this is used extensively is hospitals, but other building types are starting to adopt it. Anyplace where there is valuable portable equipment that must be tracked is a candidate for RTLS.  Nurses initially balked at carrying the RTLS tags, because they didn’t want their employer ‘tracking’ their every move. However, this changed when Personal Duress buttons were added to the tags, and the Nurses could see the personal benefit to them.

3D RF Simulations in Buildings – somewhat different from our competitors. So called Heat Maps, but our approach is very comprehensive in that we create a 3D model of the building and we can reconcile many different material types inside of a structure.  We use iBWave Wi-Fi which is a powerful tool and the only current tool that can handle inclined planes.  We primarily use this for Wi-Fi coverage simulation, but the IbWave files can also be used for cellular wireless design in buildings, although we do not have the cellular design suite, which costs $40,000.

Cellular Enhancement inside buildings – The primary tool used worldwide for Cellular/RF design inside buildings is iBwave of Montreal. We have the Wi-Fi only version of this tool which costs us about CAD $6,000 and CAD $1,000 per year in upgrades and maintenance.  The Full Enterprise Design suite including the RF and Cellular components costs over CAD $30,000 (per seat), and has a very steep learning curve. The training per person is close to CAD $20,000.  We don’t have a business case for these kinds of costs.

The full Enterprise Design suite is primarily used by the specialist contractor firms that are installing cellular enhancement systems in buildings.  Instead, we perform on-site basic site surveys using standard cell phones and commercial survey software, for a single cell provider (usually the strongest) at the site.  Ward’s Android phone also has the ability to perform multi-carrier cellular surveys, when using low cost RF survey tools.  Apple IOS devices for some inexplicable reason do not support this.  Ward also owns an RF Spectrum Analyzer that can sniff out any RF signals from 700MHz to 6GHz, which covers virtually all of the bands we typically use.

Cellular Enhancement inside the building is a required component of many Five Star Hotel RFP’s. Usually we issue a performance RFP that describes what the installers need to quote, which always must include an iBWave model of the building.  Mobile operators all demand that an iBWave model is submitted to them prior to them agreeing to connect up their equipment to the building.  

Acoustics, Recording & Sound Systems

Ward – Loudspeaker Building

Ward was building audio amplifiers, tuner receivers and oscilloscopes as kits through the 1960’s as an offshoot of his electronics training in High School.

He purchased speaker components and started building hi-fi speakers for his own use, studying the nature of resonant enclosures and loudspeaker tuning, all of which is strongly associated with formal acoustics. Ward had close friends that had a successful band in the LA area, and they asked if he could make some PA speakers for them. At the time, one of the most recognizable names in Public Address loudspeakers was the Altec Lansing Voice of the Theater range of speakers developed for cinema’s, but also extensively used in LA recording studio’s. Altec had designed a mid-sized theater speaker system called the A7-500, which referred to the cross-over frequency of 500Hz  Ward heard that Altec published the plans for the enclosures, so that people could build the speakers using Altec’s bass driver, horn/driver and cross-over. Ward called Altec and they sent him the detailed plans on how to construct the A7-500 cabinets. Ward started collecting the wood and materials for the cabinets and cleared space in his garage to set up the wood working tools. Altec Lansing at the time had a manufacturing and distribution center in Anaheim, near Disneyland. Ward had a motor cycle that was not powerful enough to drive on the LA freeways, and he lived in La Cañada, next to Pasadena, on the extreme north side of the LA basin, in the foothills of the mountains. So he took his Honda super cub 90cc motorcycle on city streets all the way to Anaheim, about 80 miles away from his home. It took over 2 hours each way. He strapped the large loudspeaker components to the back of the bike in a towering structure held together with bungee cords. He could only take one set at a time, so he had to make two trips. The components are detailed here. Ward built the cabinets including the curved Bass Horn in the photo’s in his dad’s garage and sold one set to his friends’ band. The band loved them, which led to a few more orders and Ward built three sets altogether. This started a long association with sound reinforcement that extends to this day. Ward took a detour into film special optical effects for a few years during University and while teaching in New York, but he returned to the serious study of sound when he attended the National Film and Television School of England, as a post-graduate program. He focused on film and television sound recording, mixing and post production.

Eventually when he went on to do a 3-year post-graduate program at the National Film and Television School of England (he was the only American in the cohort of 25 students), he pursued a Sound Production career, roughly analogous to the “Tonmeister” training offered at some top music schools. He recorded multiple films and TV shows while at school and started getting paid gigs in Britain, Europe and Africa., staying 6 years in Britain. He learned a lot about acoustics listening through microphones, recorders, headphones and speakers and understanding how electronics plays a part in what we do -and do not – hear. He worked with some of the top movie and recording artists during this period, including John Hurt, Eric Clapton, Muddy Waters, Joe Cocker, Van Morrison and many others, moving between intimate dramatic scenes to stadium rock concerts. Ward worked on the Van Morrison film with the now famous Cinematographer Roger Deakins, one of his NFS classmates.

Building Services Acoustics

Ward’s  real training in Building Services and architectural acoustics began in 1981, a year after moving to HK. He met two British academics and acousticians at the Royal HK Yacht Club, while guest crewing on their sailing boats at local weekend regatta’s. Ian Campbell was a Scottish Canadian Architect, and professor at the Hong Kong University School of Architecture. His partner, Andrew Shillinglaw, was a PhD mechanical engineer, also teaching building services mechanical and acoustics at HKU. Ian had emigrated to Canada after an architecture degree in Edinburgh. He always had an interest in acoustics and had done some small recital halls in Scotland. He landed a job in Toronto at the CBC in the early 1960’s, at the beginning of a big radio and TV studio building program across the country. He helped design over 30 small and large radio and TV studio’s for the CBC during this period, from St Johns to Victoria. In the late 1960’s, the Commonwealth nation of Malaysia approached the Canadian government for a studio architect/acoustician to be seconded to them in the design and construction of a new broadcasting centre in Kuala Lumpur. Ian was tapped for this role and he moved to KL. The Contract was for two years. At the end of the assignment and although technically still a CBC employee, Ian liked KL and Asia so much that he resigned from the CBC and started looking for full-time work in the region. A friend told him of an opening at HKU, which he applied for and got. So he moved to Hong Kong, on a full ‘expat’ package with a large apartment and a maid, teaching architecture with a focus on specialized spaces like public assembly/halls and studio’s. In 1970 he opened a private acoustics consultancy firm in partnership with the University.  One of the other professors in the building services program was Andrew Shillinglaw, and Andrew shared Ian’s love of acoustics but from a mechanical noise and vibration control perspective. Andrew  joined Ian Campbell in the consultancy firm in 1977, changing the name to Campbell and Shillinglaw. The firm was run out of their offices at the University and the University took part of their revenue as a partnership. They had access to a continuing supply of students and grad students to help them in their academic work and also in their private practice. Almost every local HK engineering or architectural student learned acoustics from these two men..

While Ward was sailing with these two guys, they found out Ward’s recent experience on television and film crews in the UK, Europe and Africa. C&S had a contract for studio design for the Brunei Broadcasting Centre, (Brunei is a rich oil principality on the north coast of the island of Borneo) and they were in need of some practical help in developing studios that reflected current production workflows. Ward explained how in the UK and Europe, many TV shoots were starting to use single camera EFP cameras and portable VTR’s, in a set-up similar to film shoots. This EFP shooting demanded a lot more post-production work, especially editing and sound mixing. As a result, studio design needed to change to deemphasize multi-camera shooting in a soundstage and to depend on more single camera shooting on location. Many more editing rooms and audio post rooms would be needed. This workflow change has a large impact on the design of the studio complex. Andrew and Ian suggested that Ward help them out on a freelance basis and in return, they would teach him architectural and mechanical acoustics. Ward joined Ian on a trip to the capital of Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan, to present the revised architectural program based on the change of TV production workflows.

Meanwhile, Ward joined a local Hong Kong company that was marketing chinese films (mostly Kung Fu historical epics) worldwide for the then growing home video market. This company grew quickly and soon was in the planning stages for a small but full featured video production and post-production studio in HK. At this point Ward became the client for C&S, hiring them to help in all of the detailed acoustics issues, as the studio building was in the flight path of then current HK airport, in Kowloon Tong. All of the HK TV stations had their studio complexes there, including Shaw Brothers, TVB and ATV. We ended up with a 1500 sq.foot shooting stage (the best we could do was NC-30), with 12’ ceiling and a lighting grid, a video duplication and telecine area, a main control room and an audio studio/sound editing suite. We were able to get to NC-25 for the small audio studio, although we wanted it lower, but we were constrained by the existing structure and the planes flying overhead. We had the latest and best equipment available at that time, including a Rank Cintel flying spot telecine, multiple 1” C format recorders in both PAL and NTSC, Grass Valley video mixers, and a 32 channel Soundcraft audio console. The setup included a time-code synchronized 24 track audio recorder slaved to the video machines so that we could do rock-and-roll looping and track laying. This project was finished in 1984. Ward left this company when it started having some financial difficulties, and went back to freelance work, both for C&S and others.

AMS Acoustics and Jockey Club Race Tracks

Another freelancing gig in HK that led to employment was with Peter Barnett and AMS Acoustics. Although C&S had work from time to time, it wasn’t enough to keep the lights on. A friend of Ward’s, David Burgess, was (and still is) a pro-audio equipment salesman in Hong Kong. He introduced Ward to Peter Barnett of AMS Acoustics, out of London. Peter had been contracted to the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club to completely revamp the PA systems at the Happy Valley Race Track, a 55,000 seater that is full to overflowing every Wednesday evening. Peter was a mathematician and Fellow of the UK Institute of Acoustics, who specialized in acoustical intelligibility, and had published many academic papers on the subject. He was one of the few people in the world at that time who had the skills to understand voice intelligibility as it applied to very large PA systems. Peter would go on to author one of the most important metrics in Intelligibility, called the Common Intelligibility Scale (CIS). This is used by the National Fire Alarm & Signaling code, NFPA 72, as the standard when reporting voice evacuation intelligibility.

Peter had made a rather outlandish claim to the Jockey Club, that he could design and deliver a computerized announcement and control system that could provide intelligible race commentary and announcements to the patrons, even when they were screaming for their favourite horse, whether in the stands or down by the rail, in both Cantonese and English. Nobody quite believed that this was possible, but the Jockey Club bet with their money that he could try. Ward became at first a freelancer with Peter and eventually an employee, assisting Peter with the design and installation of the worlds first large computer automatically controlled sound system (1986). We installed ambient noise sensors throughout the facility, which measure the noise made by the punters, and automatically adjusts – up or down – the PA, to always be 10dB above the ambient level. We had done extensive monitoring with our Bruel and Kjaer sound level meters and we discovered there was a 20dB swing from the quietest to the loudest ambient level during the race meetings. We therefore knew we needed to design an intelligible PA system with this amount of variable dynamic range. This was absolutely revolutionary for 1986. We ended up with over 6000 loudspeakers, 185 output zones, 250,000 watts of audio power, English and Cantonese race commentary and digital message stacking based on priority and location. Following the successful commissioning of the Happy Valley project, AMS were engaged with a follow up project at Sha Tin Racetrack, which has a capacity of 90,000 and is used for Saturday and Sunday afternoon races. This project was completed in 1988. A third race track followed in 1988/89 at the Macau Jockey Club. In the middle of 1989, while completing the Macau Project, Peter had a serious heart attack, nearly dying, necessitating a lengthy recovery process. Ward realized that his employment with AMS was in jeopardy, as Peter was the sole business development person at AMS. So Ward began a new job search that led to his years at SM&W.

Differentiated Services - Networks and Smart Buildings

We don’t view differentiation as a building type or location, but rather by specific expertise that can be applied to the project.  Ward  has relentlessly searched out niches of knowledge and services where we have few competitors.  We are comfortable competing with one or two similar companies, but if we are considered a commodity and the client sees 5 or 6 competitors as equal, we are most likely not going to win work, except for one thing – price.   We don’t want to be selected for price.  If the only benefit that we offer is price, we have failed to convey our message to the client. In fact, we want to be at a different price point than others, because we can do things better or faster or differently that will save time and effort at the client. This takes salesmanship and positioning.

It is the art of promoting the “USP”, the Unique Selling Proposition. This term includes a key word Unique, in that there is only one of it, and we have that one thing. I don’t see differentiation by location, building sector or by client type, but by service offering differentiation.

Network Design – somewhat different from our competitors, but very different in relation to the second skill, which is Network Integration.  Although our competitors can draw a simple network of switches that will work, we provide deep network re-design and transition services that are fairly unique.  For instance, we wrote the complex RFP for the replacement of all pieces of a large network at an operating airport, without impacting any air or ground operations. This requires deep knowledge of many aspects of networking that you can’t read in a cut-sheet.  It is important to highlight these skills in proposals.

Network Integration – very different from competitors.  We get into the deep IP networking issues related to establishing literally hundreds of VLAN’s, segregating networks, and describing metrics for high availability and high reliability for many different network flows.  We have even branched out into software defined networking.  A typical five star hotel network that we work on has over 300 different VLAN’s, including one for each hotel room.   We have now moved into the world of Software Defined Networking (SDN), where controller servers are directing the traffic on the network.  This is what we are using in our Network upgrade for the Kingston Jamaica airport.  

We also need to brief our clients on the latest developments in Networking such as Shortest Path Bridging (SPB), Transparent Interconnections of Lots of Links (TRILL), VXLan’s and Spine/Leaf architectures. I often say that the biggest configuration problem for networks is Spanning Tree. Both SPB and TRILL were developed to eliminate Spanning Tree shortcomings, but very few building service Engineers know these issues.

Smart Buildings – somewhat different to our competitors.  We don’t really like this phrase as it is so meaningless and dead.  A real estate professional in Hong Kong once told me that the definition of a smart building was one that is fully leased, because if it’s not fully leased, it's a dumb building.  At least he knew the name as something related to a BENEFIT, which is important.  This phrase should really be more benefit oriented, like Clean Building or Safe Building or Friendly Building or Efficient Building or Attractive Building or Inexpensive Building.  Nobody really knows what a Smart Building is, so that allows people like Cisco to define it as a big network filled with Cisco hardware or Honeywell to define it as lots of BACNET devices interconnected with Honeywell devices or Lutron to define it as lots of lighting keypads, dimmers and Eco-lume ballasts.

Another marketing term “Internet of Things (IoT)” has often been co-opted to add even more murkiness to the Smart Building fog.  We see these two phrases bandied about like they are going to save the world from climate change or cure bad breath.

Part of Ward’s job is to define the parameters, limits and capabilities of the “Interactive Building”, as a simulacrum of the Smart Building. What Ward has been doing for the last five or more years, is the practice of providing core network components and software to provide Converged networks where all data, voice, video, TV, audio, radio and security services are aggregated together onto one fat backbone network. Think of the Smart Building as really being a small version of the internet inside the building. There is a big difference however on the software integration side.

To understand this, I will need to stretch the Freeway analogy a bit. Our converged data network is a big multilane freeway with on and off-ramps and multi-level overpasses, but it is empty of vehicles.  Onto the freeway comes a taxi, where the driver only speaks German.  Onto the freeway comes a truck, where the driver only speaks Italian.  Onto the freeway comes a stream of cars, where the drivers only speak Japanese.  The drivers all know the rules of the road and they can understand the icon based signs on the freeway, so they all know how to get from their source to their destination and they don’t crash into each other (rarely).  These vehicles are data types on the network.  Those data types all co-exist happily on the network as long as the freeway doesn’t get congested and come to a traffic jam, which can happen in data networks just like on the freeway.   Network routers are the signs and traffic cops that direct the vehicles so that they get to their destination in a somewhat deterministic fashion.  However, the vehicles drivers (data packets) cannot communicate to the other vehicles drivers as they don’t understand each other’s language. So let’s say that a Japanese speaking driver needs to communicate with the truck driver who only speaks Italian, as he can see that part of the trucks load is about to fall onto the highway and  cause a big accident.  He could honk and wave, but the truck driver might not get the message.  He needs a translator and a communication path to the truck driver, but he only needs the translator for the important small bits of information that he needs to get to the Truck driver - “Your load is falling off!!!”  This is where the services of a MiddleWare integration platform come into play.  This is a piece of semi-custom software (and hardware interfaces) on the network that is listening to all of the traffic on the network.  This Integration platform ignores 99.9% of the traffic as it is only listening for traffic that is meant to “translate” from one system to another, or where one system is requesting another system to do something or to report something.  Since the different systems don't speak the same language this intermediary integration platform does the language (protocol) conversion and passes the message to the destination system.

In the case of our Five Star Hotel projects, this integration platform is the Premises Management System (PMS), often Opera Fidelio, based on an Oracle database.  The PMS acts as a host for the various application modules, written by the equipment suppliers.  There are literally thousands of integrations in the Opera ecosystem, so that a Johnson BMS can talk to a Sonifi IPTV system, via the PMS.  A guest can use the TV remote to access an on-screen menu on their TV’s to change the temperature in the room. However, for commercial buildings without a PMS, we need to use another method and that is through an integration broker or Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), like Tridium Niagara Frameworks, Connexal or Entelec Sky-Walker.

Although these products appear to be off-the-self solutions, in reality they are really automation programming and hardware environments that require extensive amount of software programming expertise.  Ward is the freeway builder, but he doesn’t do the detailed ESB configuration and programming.. One would still need to hire a controls expert to get this functionality. Building integration is NOT just a Division 25 BAS specification.

IPTV Network Design – Really this is an offshoot of the Network Integration items above.  On the networking side, it is fairly straightforward; however on the graphical user interface and service offering description, this gets quite involved on the software description and software feature side.  We now have to include guest direct connection to TV’s through Airplay, Chromecast or Miracast.  These often require customized versions of residential services.

SMATV System Design – very different from our competitors. This can be part of the IPTV design or it can be quite separate, especially when dealing with multiple sat dishes and aggregating multiple satellite beams into an overall channel offering. This can be distribution over IPTV as noted above or via digital QAM on coaxial cable.

This is a rather arcane corner of the Telecom/TV industry, but Ward has over 30 years’ experience of this dating back to the mid 1980’s.  An understanding of digital video broadcasting formats for various countries and also understanding of Sat dish transponder and sat dish low-noise electronics is key.  

Although many consulting and engineering firms just pick a manufacturer in this field and let them ‘design’ it, we don’t feel that this provides any value to the client.  We will research all of the available specialist vendors who have products exactly suitable to the client’s requirements and then assemble drawings and an RFP that is truly competitive.  For the Skorpios project we pre-approved vendors from Scotland, Portugal and Athens, with two alternates from London and Spain.  

We also do a totally unique site plan review where we look down on the site from the Geostationary satellite locations, using 3D AutoCAD, and evaluate that the line-of-sight is free from obstructions.  Sometimes the multiple dishes can occult each other – we take this into account in the 3D model.

Telecommunications Infrastructure Design

Starting in 1993, while he was in Hong Kong, Ward started taking formal Telecommunications/ Structured cabling courses, through a correspondence program at Washington State University in Pullman (Spokane).  This was before Internet-delivered courses. He got a certificate after the first three courses and then dove into Structured cabling/BICSI-type work on Asian projects.

After Ward relocated to San Francisco in 1998, he attended BICSI courses and then in 1999 sat and passed the RCDD exam in Long Beach California. The proctor for that exam in Long Beach was John Bakowski, a Canadian BICSI heavy-weight and past President of the organization.

In 2004, BICSI announced a new Certification program for Wireless Design. Since this matched Ward’s interests and experience, he pursued the study and passed the Certification exam on the first try in 2005.

Structured cabling .

This is a necessary service offering, but it’s not really a differentiator.  

Many Engineering firms do this as part of their electrical offering – they treat it as another electrical device type on their drawings.  I’m not saying this is wrong per-se, but they do a disservice to the skills of dedicated Comms designers and RCDD’s, where knowledge of the IT infrastructure is paramount.  Because they don’t have dedicated telecommunications personnel, they skate along with a very minimal amount of detail, leaving almost all of the work to the integrators.

When our Comms work is not differentiated, it becomes a commodity, and when we leave all of the details to the Comms integrators, the client is not going to see value in our Comms discipline and they will either give this work to other design firms or just give it to a design-build integrator in the first place. 

From Acoustics and Audiovisual to Telecom Design

Acoustics, AV & Telecom have one notable common element, Alexander Graham Bell. This Scottish/Canadian/American inventor and businessman coalesced many other scientists work into a business plan to get everyone to ‘talk to each other’. The Bell System grew into a business so big and influential that it was deemed a Monopoly and broken up in 1984. The common element of Acoustics, AV & Telecom is the decibel, named after Mr. Bell, which describes logarithmic ratios of signal levels. It is extensively used in all three industries, Acoustics, Audiovisual and Telecommunications

Ward started working for Shen Milsom & Wilke Inc., out of New York City in 1989, when there were 21 employees in one office (SM&W now has 260 employees in 15 offices).  He spent 3 months in New York at the head office, in order to learn the SM&W ‘method’, going back to Hong Kong in 1990 to open the branch office there.  At that time Ward was doing Audiovisual and Acoustics, as SM&W was first and foremost an Acoustics consultant.  See below on Acoustics knowledge. For the next 3 years Ward did Acoustics and AV.  

In 1993, at our annual company ‘off-site’ meetings, Ward was told by Fred Shen that he needed to learn Telecommunications and Networking, as AV was moving in this direction, and that it was a profitable discipline in itself. Ward continued to do Acoustics and AV work right up through leaving SM&W in 2003, although Telecom occupied about half of his billable time.

Eric Clapton & His Rolling Hotel

Recently I was talking to an old friend on Skype, Rex Pyke, a British Film Producer/Director/Editor now living in the border regions of Scotland. I worked on a film with Rex in the fall of 1978. The film was entitled "Eric Clapton and His Rolling Hotel". It was a concert and tour documentary of a European tour that year, in support of his Album “Backless”. The film was never released because it showed Rock Musicians doing what they normally do - too much drugs and drink. Rex told me that pirate clips of the film had been posted to YouTube, from VHS demo copies.

Eric's promoter at that time was Robert Stigwood. Robert Stigwood thought that it would be a good idea for Eric, his band, Muddy Waters and his band, Stigwood, and a film crew to spend 2 weeks touring around Europe in a 6-star three car train hired from Deutsche Bundesbahn. The train, originally built for Herman Goering of the Third Reich, comprised a forward Suite Car, with full staterooms, equipped with brass bathtubs and a small lounge at the front. The middle car was the Restaurant car, comprising a full kitchen, wine cellar and formal dining room. The rear car was made up of small cabins which us hoi-polloi shared, including showers in each unit. The entire interior was rare rosewood and marquetry veneer.

The idea was for the bands to unpack in the train and do gigs around Europe without ever having to unpack. The train pulled into small sidings in each town, usually within a km or two of the show venue, and Limo's would be waiting to whisk the stars to the gigs. Fans couldn't figure out why nobody ever saw them at hotels or restaurants in their respective cities. The tour started in Madrid, but we joined the train in Lyon. After that we went to numerous German , French & Belgian destinations, ending up in Amsterdam. Some were two nights each. After the shows, the bands returned to the train to sleep. We went with them to the gigs, filming all the back-stage activity, with the concerts themselves edited in from the British leg of the tour.

The restaurant in particular, was spectacular. In the middle of the night (6:00AM to us was the middle of the night) the train would stop in the middle of nowhere, and the Chef would get out to meet a farmer, providing fresh poultry, meat, vegetables and fish, cheeses and local spirits such as Schnapps or Armangnac/Cognac. Sometimes behind the farmer was a small bread van from the local bakery with fresh croissants, bread and pastries. Most of these items were the best of the local farmers production. Things couldn't be fresher. One day we had fresh rabbit, another day, quail from the farmers fields, or trout that he had caught in a local river.

Table service was linen and 100% silver flatware, with an extensive wine collection from the cellar or from the farmers.

The restaurant was open essentially 24 hours per day, with three formal sit-down meals and snacks or sandwiches available anytime. This was really first-class travel, and we got paid to do this.

Every minute that the band members were awake, we were filming, so for us Crew, we worked about 20 hours on, 4 hours off. The only time we seemed we could get any shut-eye was between 4:00AM and 8:00AM.

I was the Production Sound Recordist. Because of the cramped quarters of the train and the working environment, I chose a small sound rig based on a Nagra SN reel-to-reel recorder using 1/8" tape, recording full track Mono at 3 3/4ips. This was married with a Dutch-made Noriyuki ( I know, sounds Japanese -NOT) mixer (picture's below)

Nagra SNN in Noriyuki Mixer

Noriyuki Mixer

Sennheiser MKH 405

The Mixer included powering for T-powered Condenser mics, so I used a complete set of Sennheiser MKH Condensers, including the 405, 415, 815 (shotgun) and some lavaliere mics. The shotgun proved too unwieldy, so I stuck mostly to the cardiod 405 (pictured above) and the short shotgun hyper-cardioid interference tube 415. The jamming music session were almost all recorded with a single 405, which is applicable to the clip I am linking to here. Occasionally I had some time to set up a second mic on a short stand and for the formal interviews I used a Sennheiser lavaliere. The Nagra SN does not have power rewind - you have to unfold the crank between the two blue reels and hand crank the tape to the beginning so that you can load a new reel. The reels of tape would run for about 25 minutes and then would need to be quickly replaced so we could continue shooting. I would motion to the director that we were getting near to the end of a reel, and he would wrap up the synch shooting while I changed reels. As I never had the time to rewind the reels , I kept the reels colour coded and in my vest pocket with the ‘tails out’. I had a special working vest made with numerous small pockets, each just big enough to place one tape reel. On my left side were the unrecorded reels and my right side were the recorded reels, with the tails out. I got to the point where I could change reels in about 15 seconds. The cameraman was using an Aaton Super 16mm camera, with a 400 foot coaxial magazine, which lasts just under 11 minutes and then he would have to change magazines. He had a camera assistant to load magazines, but I was on my own.

Eric was travelling on the train with his girlfriend, Patti Boyd, previously married to George Harrison. He had had a crush on Patti since she was married to George, and it was to her that he wrote his famous song "Layla", recorded in 1970. I got to know them pretty well in the 2 weeks on the train. I was actually invited to their wedding in the spring of 1979, but couldn't go as I was on location in Ghana, Africa on a feature film there. Having the hots for his wife never seemed to affect the friendship between George Harrison and Eric. They remained close up to George's death. George put in a cameo performance, with Elton John, on the last night of the Tour as you can see from the list below. After the last concert in Guildford, we all went off to a bang-up party at Eric's little house (Mansion) outside Guildford. Elton played the Piano, lounge style, and George strummed away in the corner, while his ex-wife hung off Eric's arm! No filming allowed, this was a social event.

I never saw Eric doing drugs at that time, but he drank a lot of Cognac and 7-Up, what the Brits call "Brandy and Lemonade".The other members of his band were not so restrained and I saw a lot of serious drug taking. We shot almost everything that moved in that 2 weeks. Carl Radle died two years later in a Heroin overdose.

I even had an arm wrestling session with Eric on the floor of the train, but I went easy on him as I didn't want to damage his golden arm/hand.

I have never saw a formal copy of the finished film as I mentioned it was never released. I have a credit on the film with Glynn Johns credited with the Post-Production, as he did all the mixing of the concert footage.

So, here is the clip available on YouTube. In the foreground is Jamie Oldaker, drummer in Eric's band. This was shot in the Lounge at the front of the Suite car. Video quality isn't great, but you get the idea.

Enjoy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-lKbNpznww

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/132709/Eric-Clapton-and-His-Rolling-Hotel/overview

MEMBERS(December 7th, 1978)

Eric Clapton(guitar)

George Terry(guitar)?

Dick Sims(keyboard)

Carl Radle(bass)

Jamie Oldaker(drums)

Pinetop Perkins(piano, Standing Around Crying/Sad Sad Day)?

Bob Margolin(guitar, Standing Around Crying/Sad Sad Day)?

Jerry Potnoy(Harmonica, Standing Around Crying/Sad Sad Day)?

Muddy Waters(guitar, Standing Around Crying/Sad Sad Day)

George Harrison(guitar, Further On Up The Road)

Elton John(piano, Further On Up The Road)

SET LISTS(December 7th, 1978)

1. Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever

2. Worried Life Blues

3. Badge

4. Tulsa Time

5. Early In The Morning

6. Wonderful Tonight

7. Crossroads

8. Cocain

9. Double Trouble

10. Layla?

11. (an encore)Standing Around Crying/Sad Sad Day

12. (an encore)Further On Up The Road

George and Elton John joined Eric Clapton concert for an encore

"Further On Up The Road" on the final date of his "Backless" Europe and UK Tour.