Tech Forum

In our stake Louisville Kentucky we have a Spanish Branch. while many of the Spanish Member have a good grasp of English we do provide simultaneous translation using the headsets for our Spanish members during stake conference. Recently, we have had a small number of new converts who are African refugees, beside their home language speak French and have limited English skill. The headsets with its accompanying transmitter are all set for the same channel and we can only translate for one language. We are searching options on ways on how can resolve this issue for our new African members. Is their any multi channel transmitting products the church been using?

Thomes C. Dodd
thomes@twc.com
Louisville Stake High Councilor

Being as this is a user-to-user mutual-support forum, it's not very likely an official representative will see this thread to provide an official solution. You will likely get better solutions by asking through official support/help channels. The stake PFR or STS could contact the FM group, or one of those brethren could contact the GSC.

Meanwhile, from the user-to-user gallery, if all units are manually set to the proper channel(s), you could have two totally separate systems on different channels, one for each language. The channels would need to use non-overlapping frequencies with enough space between to avoid mutual interference.

IIUC, the modern receivers for assisted listening for the hearing impaired have some automatic channel-seeking logic. Depending on situation details, such an automatic feature could be problematic or helpful. In a pinch, it might be technically feasible to hijack that assisted listening system for one of the non-English languages.

thomesc wrote:The headsets with its accompanying transmitter are all set for the same channel and we can only translate for one language.

Please post the details on the units. The one's I've seen are changeable.

rmrichesjr wrote:IIUC, the modern receivers for assisted listening for the hearing impaired have some automatic channel-seeking logic.

The Comtek gray ones were like that. (The older cream colored ones were fixed channel).

We just got some receivers from Listen Technologies for the hearing impaired. That model (4200) is fixed channel, but with with software can be programmed to another channel. The 5200 is user selectable among pre-programmed &labeled channels.

We have some older headsets that are switchable to 4 different channels, allowing us to do 4 different languages.

The transmitters are designed to only transmit a single signal. You would have to have a second transmitter to broadcast two different languages.

General Conference is broadcast in mono. Each satellite channel has two languages: one on the Right channel and another on the Left. Since you're in the United States, your unused channel is probably Spanish. All you need to do is connect a line out to the other channel and you should have Spanish.

See this page for the satellite channel listings: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/hel ... g?lang=eng

If you need more languages, the church will give you an additional satellite receiver. In the olden days, we actually had a receiver that could tune additional languages (we got 6 languages and had one receiver), but I don't know if they still have that model. We currently have two receivers so we can get 4 languages. The languages come in pairs, and the pairs work out to what we need.

mevans wrote:General Conference is broadcast in mono. Each satellite channel has two languages: one on the Right channel and another on the Left. Since you're in the United States, your unused channel is probably Spanish. All you need to do is connect a line out to the other channel and you should have Spanish.

Which is great for general conference. I think the prior posters were concerned about local meetings like stake conference.

russellhltn wrote: Which is great for general conference. I think the prior posters were concerned about local meetings like stake conference.

Oh, that's right, I missed that important word -- "stake" -- in his original post.

A quick and easy way is to use a Zoom meeting as the other channel. I recently used it experiment to not use headsets and headphones during Covid with
branch member. I forgot my headset adapter so ended up speaking directly into my phone. I used carrier cellular network not church wifi and the receiving person said it worked well. In speaking with the Stake tech specialist, they tried it once with a stake meeting in a pinch and we are going try it with a 2nd church broadcast connection for one of our sacrament services.