With three campuses, Horry Georgetown Technical College is a leading South Carolina educational institution offering more than 80 associate degree, diploma, and certificate programs, as well as a diverse and rapidly-expanding list of corporate and business training options through its Workforce Development Division.
William Jacocks, Account Executive for Troxell Communications.
To maintain its reputation, the college recently completed a training facility at its Conway campus and, as part of the sophisticated setup that facilitates a wide range of signal access, conversion, and switching capabilities, the new space employs a variety of connectivity solutions from Brea, CA-based Altinex.
West Columbia, SC-based Troxell Communications, an audio-visual supplier with a nationwide reach that includes design / build services among its many offerings, was contracted to design the college’s new AV training facility and install the equipment. William Jacocks, an account executive for the company, was closely involved throughout all stages of the project. He discussed the challenges the new facility presented and his reason for securing a substantial amount of Altinex equipment to help bring the new space to fruition.
“The new space at Horry Georgetown Technical College is designed to accommodate training, meetings, and classroom instruction,” Jacocks explained. “Known as the Collaboration Room, the facility incorporates six custom-designed tables from Chippewa Falls, WI-based Spectrum Furniture, with each table including five Altinex CNK361 Tabletop Cable-Nook Jr. interconnect boxes that make it easy to patch, for example, a laptop computer into the system for presentation purposes. These five interconnect boxes at each table enable five participants to be connected into the system. There is one display mounted at each table plus a main room projector. The goal of the system was to make it easy for any person in the room—seated at any of the six custom designed tables—to have their presentations viewable from any seat in the room.”
It addition to providing support for VGA signals, as commonly found on laptop computers, the staff at Horry Georgetown Technical College recognized the necessity of having the capability to accommodate High Definition HDMI sources like those found on newer computers and devices such as Blu-Ray Disc players. In order to make the switching, routing, and conversion of signals seamless to meeting participants, six Altinex UT250-101 under table 8 x 4 matrix switchers, thirty VP500-100 HDMI to VGA converters, six VP500-101 VGA to HDMI converters, and thirty MX2106AV 2-in 2-out VGA Auto + Audio switchers were placed into service.
Jacocks described the setup, “Each table is equipped with one UT250-101 matrix switcher, one VP500-101 VGA to HDMI converter, five VP500-100 HDMI to VGA converters, and five 5 MX2106AV switchers. This setup enables signals from each of the six tables to be routed to all tables as well as the projector. As the UT250-101 only accepts VGA in, we deployed the VP500-100 and VP500-101 adapters to handle the necessary signal conversion that would enable operation with the MX2106AV switchers—thus creating a ‘network’ that seamlessly transports either type of signal to the displays.”
When queried about those product attributes that made the Altinex equipment well suited for this project, Jacocks offered the following thoughts. “The CNK361 interconnect boxes make it easy to connect into the system while providing switcher control that is integrated right into the surface plate. These units, used with the UT250-101 matrix switchers, made it easy to configure multiple input table locations to a single display.
With an AV system of this level, there will always be questions that arise and, on that note, Jacocks rates Altinex customer and technical support services first-rate, “When we approached Altinex technical support for a solution, they were very responsive and spot on. They even provided us with a system diagram to help us visualize how everything came together. They were a pleasure to work with.”
