If you own one of our rack receivers, you’re no doubt familiar with Wireless Designer. We specifically developed it to be intuitive and easy to use. Here are three things that you might be unaware of that can enhance your experience and utility when using this software:
Firmware Updates
Keeping your firmware updated is critical to ensure that your equipment performs as designed. Did you know that we have an RSS feed at the bottom of our Firmware page that will alert you when you need to download an update? If you don’t already have one, search and install an RSS reader for your browser of choice or download a mobile RSS app to get notifications. Then visit the Support page and click on the RSS icon.
If you’d rather not or are unable to set this up automatically, you can look at the change log for each product (following the same link above) to see if there are updates. Any firmware files that start with “wd_v” followed by a date can be used by Wireless Designer. Manually download the files, connect to Wireless Designer and run the Update Wizard (access by choosing Connect – Update Firmware – choose your equipment from the menu tree) from the top menu. The Wizard will tell you whether or not your equipment is up to date. No guesswork!
Walk Test Recorder
The Walk Test Recorder within Wireless Designer allows you to learn extent of coverage for a wireless channel in a particular setting. Operating range limits and dropout zones can be observed by walking a transmitter around a location and recording certain properties of the received signal. The recording, which displays graphically, can be rewound to an earlier point in time and replayed and is saved to a file for future reference. This is a great feature that allows walk testing to be done by a single person without help. The steps are simple:
- Connect to the receiver/s, then click (at left) on the specific frame you want to use for the test.
- Create a new file for recording and name it. This is a critical step and not obvious.
- Select channel to test
- Select parameters to record
- If you want to record audio, check the box and select source.
- Connect the headphone output of the receiver to your computer’s audio input, and select the headphone output channel on your receiver (should be the same one you selected for the walk test in Wireless Designer)
- Start recording; stop when scan is complete
- Replay the walk test recording as needed. When playing back after recording, make sure you move the scrollbar at the bottom of the frame (circled in red) to the desired time period.
Frequency Scan & Coordination
This feature picks the modules within your unit that have the best coverage, scans all of the available frequencies for RF levels in the area and helps you choose the most optimal (meaning, that has the least interference) frequencies out of what is available in the connected units. This is a real time-saver when you have to coordinate more than one unit, because it accounts for all units connected to the system and allows you to create custom channels and user groups– even with non-Lectrosonics units!
- Start the system scan. Frequencies with active RF are shown below as yellow spikes
- Stop the scan when you feel that you’ve captured enough of the range – usually it is best to let it go one full round 2. Export to Frequency Coordination, then go to that tab in the software. A tutorial on how to do Frequency Coordination, if you don’t know or need a refresher, can be found here.
- Once you do this, you can deploy the settings to all of the units in your system
- Important tip: Custom channels utilizing stored data only include the custom settings you’ve saved
Fitting All Receivers on One Screen
Once you have all of your receivers connected, you can see all of them on one screen or zero in on a section by using Ctrl + or Ctrl – (it’s the same for Mac and PC) to zoom in or out.
Wireless Designer is our only product for which all of the Help files are online. Be sure to check our Support documents and revision history here.
We also have a wealth of Wireless Designer information, specific to product, on our YouTube channel.
Take some time to explore other features and capabilities of this very versatile tool by visiting our online documentation support pages at https://www.lectrosonics.com/Support/Wireless-Designer%E2%84%A2/wireless-designer-2.html. And let us know if you have suggestions of things that would be helpful, or things that you want to see!
