Richard Pilbrow signed copies of his autobiographical story A Theatre Project in the PLASA booth. Incandescent burns on! ETC has fi nally produced a Source Four Fresnel. The fresnel was introduced at Showtech in Berlin in June, but PLASA 2011 is the fi rst time I had an opportunity to see it. It uses the HPL lamp, which product manager Tom Littrell says is about the worst type of lamp you could chose for a fresnel. However, a carefully designed cold-mirror refl ector helps make it work—and work quite well. The fresnel barndoors, it spots, it fl oods, it’s smooth with an easy to blend edge, and with the 750 W HPL it puts out as much light as a lot of 1 kW fresnels. The lamp is accessed from the bottom, so you can replace it without losing focus or juggling barndoors and gel frames at the top of a ladder. Chromlech won a PLASA Awards for Innovation for its Gleamer, a DMX512-controlled low voltage dimmer pack that offers nine channels of dimming for resistive loads up to 12 A or 300 W in the range from 6 to 28 volts. If more power is needed, the dimmers can be paralleled to run loads up to 2,700 W. The PLASA judges said that “it provides new life for old Svobodas,” so there you go if you have an old Svoboda light curtain—or maybe a few Reiche & Vogel Beamlights or ACLs. Power input is 200 to 230 VAC at 13 amperes, so you can run a nine-channel dimmer pack off a household electrical outlet in the UK. I have no credible data to back up my opinion, but I think I saw fewer rigging products at PLASA this year. Nevertheless, one of them interested me and won another fall 2011 of the PLASA Awards for Innovation: Total Solutions’ Video Tech Truss. It’s a hefty triangular truss that’s used point-down with a video wall supported from the bottom chord. The two top chords have rails from which a bosun’s chair can be suspended so a technician can work on the a video wall without having to climb on it. Good idea! Breaking the wall or falling—either one can ruin your whole day. The two-meter modules nestle in a stack for storage. There were many wireless networking products, too. One of the oldest manufacturers in the market, City Theatrical, showed the SHoW DMX Neo and SHoW DMX SHoW Baby. The Neo offers better data fi delity in noisy RF environments and much lower latency—7 ms rather than 60 ms—compared to what is now called SHoW DMX Classic. The user interface allows a wide variety of parameters to be changed, but the Neo also has an Adaptive Mode that will automatically select open radio channels, removing one thing for the user to fi ddle with and perhaps get wrong. For the ultimate in no-fi ddling, Spotlight was one of the few manufacturers that would allow the interior of their LED luminaires to be viewed and photographed. Extrapolating from the V-chart specs using Mike Woods’s rule-of-thumb, a Spotlight Fresneled 50 can be calculated to deliver about 1600 lumens while consuming no more than 55 watts. City Theatrical showed the SHoW Baby, a little orange box with four jacks on it. One’s for the power. Plugging that in turns it on. Another is for the antenna. The other two are for the DMX cable. Plug the cable into the input jack and the SHow Baby is a transmitter. Plug it into the output jack, and it’s a receiver. There is no user interface other than those jacks and a few lights on the front to tell you what it’s doing. SHoW DMX Neo is designed to send DMX512-type data wirelessly in noisy 2.4 GHz environments. Sundrax also showed some 2.4 GHz wireless DMX512 data distribution equipment, but they also showed a device that avoids 2.4 GHz band congestion all together by using the GSM-900 and GSM-1800 frequency bands for cell phones in Europe, Middle East, Africa, Australia, and most of Asia: the Kulon-C streetlight controller. The system allows a person to turn on and off up to four streetlight circuits, to monitor the line voltage and the status of the lamps, and to capture snapshots from a camera set-up for road monitoring. The immediate advantages of GSM is the distance that can be covered and the shift of network maintenance to a cell phone company, but it also allows you to monitor and control the streetlights with a simple cell phone. The name “Kulon” comes from the name of an old Russian munitions factory: secure and stable. That’s it! Word count’s used up. Next year PLASA 2012 returns to Earls Court from Sunday 9 to Wednesday 12 September 2012. There are plans for the Earls Court Exhibition Centre to be torn down in what a Hammersmith and Fulham Council spokesperson called “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to double the number of affordable homes in the area ...” —but that’s all to happen after the building houses the Olympic volleyball tournaments from July 28 through August 12 and the PLASA show. Next year might be our last chance to enjoy the old building, but I am sure there will be lots of interesting new products to see and hear. I’ll see you there. PHO T O COUR TESY : CHRIST OPHER T OULMIN 84 FALL 2011