I am often asked, "Can I mix one brand of wireless mic with another brand of antennas or distros?” Many times this has confused a wireless user as the marketing materials would suggest there are some special benefits to keeping it all in the family. Intuitively it seems logical, however many times you can improve performance and reliability by creating a system using the best performers over multiple brands.
In this article we will attempt to explain when that might be a problem and when it definitely won’t. I usually read magazines by flipping from the last page to the first. So let’s start with the conclusion first and then work our way backwards from there.
“But surely there must be exceptions for mixing analog and digital signals?” Actually, radio waves by nature are all analog.
Almost without exception it is permissible and often advantageous to mix brands when considering the transportation of the RF energy itself. There is no particular advantage in having the same logo on every piece in your system. Radio waves are a universal force of nature and no manufacturer uses a proprietary form of it, despite what you may have heard about digital versus analog wireless systems. So as long as your substitutions function inside the proper frequency ranges and power levels there is almost never a situation where this can cause a problem. You probably won’t even have to worry much about this as almost anything you can purchase in the USA from any manufacturer is regulated by FCC rules. Any exceptions would be for Part 74 licensed users and even then there are almost none.
Antenna brand mixing
If you are expanding the channel count of an existing system and you need to add another distro or two. Again, no problem to mix brands as they will all play nicely with each other. You should choose the best quality distro to feed the other distros when cascading/combining them. It is preferable to use the highest quality unit and then connect the remaining distros with a parallel hookup to avoid additional losses, but brand won’t matter.
Another frequent question is “But surely there must be exceptions for mixing analog and digital signals?” Radio waves by nature are all analog. “Digital wireless” just defines the modulation scheme applied to the radio wave itself that carries the audio information. There are multiple digital schemes for this just as there are multiple analog schemes (FM and AM). So your antennas, coax and distros simply don’t care about the modulation schemes. They will happily perform looking at either or even both at the same time. You should however treat the entire mixed system as a digital system with respect to channel spacing and keep adjacent channels, both analog ones and digital ones, at least 600 kHz apart for best results.
Check out the biggest stages in the world and you’ll see they almost never use one brand...
This does mean that you will not be successful trying to use a “digital” transmitter with an “analog“ receiver however. In fact most times you cannot mix transmitters and receivers, even when they are the same brand as the compander schemes and the digital modulations may turn out to be incompatible.
Think about it this way… consider your PA system. You plug a mic into a mixer then on to a power amp and a speaker. When you speak into the mic it delivers the signal to the electronics and out to the speaker where everyone can now hear it. But if the next person to speak into the mic does so in a foreign language that mic still delivers the words into the electronics and they eventually pop out through the speaker. While you may not understand the language it is pretty obvious that you do not need to change the microphone to accommodate the difference in language.
So feel free to mix and match the best quality gear you can find and don’t worry about the logos matching. When failure was not an option, the engineers for the Tokyo Olympics chose the best microphones and accessories for the job – and mixed brands. Check out the biggest stages in the world and you’ll see they almost never use one brand – they select the best of each, e.g., microphones and antennas.