What Do You Need on Site Before a Live Link Can Go to Air?

Our portable units send pictures and sound back to your gallery, and the first job on arrival is finding a spot where that can happen reliably. Open ground with a clear view of the sky or good network coverage is ideal. A narrow street between tall buildings, a car park under a deck or a valley road can all be difficult, and we would rather know about the surroundings in advance than discover them at the moment of the cue.

If you can tell us the exact spot, even by a street name or a landmark, Megan, our sound and live engineer, will look at the surroundings before the crew leaves. She checks the approach, the likely obstructions and whether a second position nearby would give a safer fallback.

We do not ask producers to survey anything. We ask for the address or description, and a rough idea of where the reporter will stand, because that decides where the unit goes.

A live unit is only as good as its power, and the question of how long you will be on air shapes what we bring. A single two-way of three minutes is a different job from a rolling hour of updates through an evening. Tell us the likely duration, including rehearsal and any time on standby before the first cue, because standby is where batteries quietly disappear.

Mid autumn adds its own conditions. Light fades early, rain arrives without much warning, and wind off the water along our coast can make a tripod and an umbrella a poor pairing. Crews carry weather cover for the equipment as a matter of routine, but a reporter standing on an exposed seafront for forty minutes needs a plan too.

If the location has mains power and the owner is happy for us to use it, that helps. If it does not, we bring what we need and plan the schedule around it.

Every live job we run has a named contact at the gallery and a named contact on location, and they have each other's mobile numbers before anything is switched on. It sounds obvious, yet it is the item most often missing when a story breaks fast and a crew is sent out on a single phone call.

The person at your end should be someone who can make a decision about the picture, such as a gallery producer or a duty editor, and who can be reached while the programme is running. Our person on site is usually Carys or a senior operator, working with Megan on the link. If the line drops, they need to be able to speak to you without going through three people.

We also agree in advance what happens if the signal fails: whether you want us to keep trying, switch to a recorded piece, or send a backup by another route. Deciding that calmly beforehand is much easier than deciding it on air.