School Building PA with Bell Schedules

[Tim]

Anybody using AHM for school bell schedules? Looking to replace ancient Valcom / Telcor system. Floor amplifiers are new and located in IDF’s. I imagine using an AHM16, Dante card, and DT02’s to connect to various 25-volt speaker amplifiers around the building.

I’ve been introduced to AHM thru an A&H in-person class, so I haven’t worked with it extensively. But, from what I’ve seen, in order to be a turnkey bell-schedule system, the AHM scheduling feature would need to be more robust. We have 5-6 different bell schedules used throughout the year, so the repeat feature that only picks days of the week would have to be constantly updated. The best initial solution the tech and I could think of would be to use a computer with a scheduling app playing the bells, with that computer’s audio output being used for an AHM input. So, no internal AHM scheduling or audio file playing.

Similar to playing 20 or so bells a day, we play music before and after school. With a more robust scheduling system, we could upload those songs and schedule them internally, as opposed to keeping everything on a separate device.

So:
1. Is anyone doing something similar yet? Any advice?
2. Consider this a feature request 🙂

Thanks!

[Highflyer1953]

You could save your different bell trigger and music timings as different presets then, using an IP GPIO module (8×8 digital I/O networked IP unit) trigger the recall of each preset at the start of its appropriate season, from an external master clock.

[Tim]

Thanks for the suggestion, in this case it’s not just a season, it’s a constant turnover of schedules. M-Tu-F are the same schedule; W-Th are the same schedule, but Wed 10/9 had a M-Tu-F schedule, and Thu 10/10 had yet a 3rd schedule. Fri 9/27 had a 4th different schedule. I can’t trust an end user to press a button every day when 150 classroom depend on the results.

Again, it’s a simple solution to use a different device entirely with purpose-built software, but having an even better scheduling system in the AHM series could be a KILLER app for school PA systems.

[Highflyer1953]

I now clearly see your situation , and understand your request. You could still use an AHM as music, and even recorded bell source, and zone router, but with external scheduling, triggering presets. Whether or not that would be of particular interest is your choice.
One thing I can tell you, with over 50 years experience of A&H, almost since they first started, they will never inform you of what developments are under consideration. The most they reveal is if some request may be possible, or not.

[Tim]

Agreed. But I went to an official A&H class on the AHM and it was stated that their developers are required to be familiar with requests in the forums, so just throwing my 2 cents out there. I’m still leaning towards the AHM for this, and will have to work out external scheduling, and maybe hope that new features come sometime in the distant future… 🙂

It looks like QSYS has more robust scheduling, but I have QSYS elsewhere and would not necessarily trust it for this application.

Cheers!

[Highflyer1953]

Your first comment is perfectly correct, A&H team listen very carefully to client requirement inputs, especially on these official forums, and many of their firmware updates grow from seeds planted by the likes of you and I with novel applications.

I will follow your development with interest, though technically retired, I’m over 70, I still act as systems advisor to several local churches, including our local Anglican Cathederal, and am always interested in uses for AHM. My Avatar is my home A&H system, SQ5, AHM64 and MEU all with Dante, plus DX Hub and various DX boxes, all with control capabilities using Bome Box for MIDI and IP6, for direct control of AHM.

[Author]

Posts