RF Venue Antennas Move Into The Villages

Florida (April 10, 2025)—The Villages in Central Florida may be one of the nation’s largest retirement communities, but it’s been putting a bevy of RF Venue CP Stage antennas to work.

There’s a string of performance stages throughout the community, and in recent times, performers were experiencing poor wireless IEM reception with RF hits and dropouts at three specific venues. The audio team tried OEM transmitter combiners and some external antennas, but to no avail. Gregory Lynch, assistant technical manager at The Villages, remarked “Some racks even used chassis-mounted whips or mismatched omni antennas, and we had long runs of old lossy coax cable—obviously this was not ideal.”

Following a consultation with RF Venue’s Adam Brass, the team installed two RF Venue CP Stage antennas, along with lower-loss LMR400 cable. “We reached out to RF Venue to explain our situation and were guided toward the CP Stage antenna as a solution,” said Lynch. “The directionality and gain of the antenna immediately solved the dropouts, whisps, and RF hits. Our usable range improved dramatically.”

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The first low-profile CP Stage antenna was ceiling-mounted above the outdoor stage at The Villages’ Sawgrass Grove venue, connected via 100 feet of LMR400 cable with the CP Stage’s housing. The second was installed in an outdoor venue at Spanish Springs, an “in-the-round” city-square style venue, where it’s currently mounted on a mic stand with plans to move it to the ceiling.

The three outdoor venues have fixed racks housing four Shure PSM300 in-ear monitor transmitters. A pair of portable IEM racks, each with two transmitters, allow up to eight channels of wireless IEM monitoring per venue. Each venue uses Shure PA411 IEM transmitter combiners to feed the CP Stage antennas. “The musicians noticed the difference right away, as previously they took RF hits and had regular audio dropouts,” stated Lynch. “The RF performance is solid, and the dropouts are gone. They’re happy, and so are we.”