Most frequency coordination failures don’t happen on show day. They happen weeks earlier, when someone looks at a channel chart, picks frequencies that ‘worked last time,’ and assumes the environment hasn’t changed. It has. It always has.
That’s the gap our proprietary RF War-Game™ process was designed to close. Before a single transmitter powers up on site, we’ve already modeled the event against millions of channel permutations, stress-tested the worst-case intermod combinations, and mapped where the environment will bite us. The goal is simple: by the time crew shows up, we already know what’s going to fail — and we’ve already designed around it.
Step one: the spectrum audit
Every War-Game starts with ground truth. We pull historical interference data for the venue, identify licensed local users, and coordinate with the FCC database and local broadcasters. Then we send spectrum analyzers into the venue to capture the RF floor as it actually is, not as the paperwork says it should be.
This step surfaces the surprises that paper planning misses — a new LTE small cell on the adjacent block, a two-way radio system the building added last quarter, an FM station with a harmonic that lives exactly where you wanted to put your IFB. Better to know in week one than in the middle of a rehearsal.
Step two: simulation
With clean data in hand, the War-Game engine runs the math. For every proposed channel assignment, it calculates the third-order intermodulation products, checks harmonic relationships, models the output against venue geometry, and flags any combination that produces interference above threshold.
The reason we brute-force this instead of relying on rules of thumb is simple: intermod math doesn’t care what worked last year. Add one new wireless camera, move a transmitter ten feet, or bring in a vendor with non-standard gear, and combinations that were fine before can light up the spectrum in ways no spreadsheet will catch.
Step three: the plan nobody has to think about
The output of the War-Game is a device-level frequency plan — every transmitter gets a specific channel, a specific power level, and a specific physical location. Vendors receive color-coded credentials tied to their assignments. On-site inspectors know exactly what should be transmitting where, which means anything that doesn’t match that picture is, by definition, a rogue.
That clarity is what turns a chaotic load-in into a managed process. When 200 wireless devices need to come online across three days, you don’t have time to debug on the fly. You need a plan that already answered the questions.
Three tips for sharpening your own pre-event planning
- Walk the venue with a spectrum analyzer, not a clipboard. The RF environment you inherit is never the one the site map describes. Thirty minutes of live capture will teach you more than a week of email.
- Model intermod before you buy. If your gear list locks you into combinations that create third-order products inside your own operating band, no amount of on-site tuning will fix it. Run the math at the planning stage.
- Write down your fallback plan. Every primary frequency should have a pre-coordinated backup. When you need it, you’ll need it fast — and ‘let me think’ isn’t a plan.
Why simulation beats reaction
There’s a reason we call it a War-Game and not a checklist. The goal isn’t to document what you intend to do — it’s to find out what breaks before you do it. An event is the wrong place to discover a coordination problem. A simulation is the right place.
Work With Broad Comm Don’t wait until load-in to find out your spectrum plan has gaps. Contact Broad Comm today for a pre-event spectrum audit — we’ll map your RF landscape, flag conflicts, and hand you a coordination plan that holds up under pressure.
