Introduction
Tyco Integrated Systems have successfully supplied and installed a new digital congress system for the Scottish Parliament Corporate Body. This new digital congress system is for the main chamber and the six committee rooms, to provide electronic voting by use of chip cards that can also be used for other functions, i.e. ID cards, access control and cashless vending.
The System
The system provides operator controlled microphones in the main chamber and the committee rooms; it also provides simultaneous interpretation facilities for 5 languages with the scope to increase with additional booths to enable up to 15 language channels in the future.
The system works by the sound engineer operating the main PC controlled DCN server, the MSP’s microphones are only operated when required. There are another 5 PC’s at the main chamber, three of these are on the top desk where the presiding officer sits, and these are mainly to view microphone status and voting results. The other two PC’s are used for monitoring the attendance of MSP’s and to start and end the voting sessions. The system is networked to other PC’s in the broadcast area; these PC’s are used to automatically control the broadcast cameras in the chamber and to also display the captioning.
When a MSP has their card in the delegate unit the system knows where this person is sitting. The camera can be set so that it can follow live microphones automatically to different seat positions and brings up the captioning of the MSP’s name, title and party etc. Another significant feature of the system is the sound reinforcement. There is infra-red language distribution using infra-red receivers and induction loops for the hard of hearing.
The most distinctive feature of the system is that the microphones are not plugged directly into the delegate units, but are built into the design of the MSP’s desks by a curved silver tube in which the microphone is fitted.
