BBC - Royal Funeral Coverage

The sad loss of Her Majesty the Queen in September 2022 triggered the long planned arrangements to provide coverage of the state ceremonies for an enormous worldwide audience, many of whom had only known Elizabeth the Second as The Queen of England.

Presteigne was trusted with several critical elements in delivering this complex broadcast operation, the first of which was the provision of all RF systems and engineers in Edinburgh. This supported the coverage of the arrival of the Queen in Edinburgh after her journey from Balmoral and the subsequent lying in state there before her departure to Westminster Abbey. This was an urgent task with the first Presteigne engineers on site in Edinburgh on the Saturday following the announcement to rig the systems. In total Presteigne deployed 16 RF links across the city in support of 12 wireless camera systems at locations from Holyrood through the Royal Mile, inside and outside of St. Giles Cathedral and onto the departure route past Edinburgh Castle.

During the period of mourning marked by the official lying in state of the coffin within Westminster Abbey, Presteigne moved quickly to mobilise its Projects department to prepare and build a four camera studio that would sit atop the Methodist Central Hall (“MCH”) opposite the entrance to the Abbey.

This location, well within the inner security perimeter had stringent access limitations in addition to the challenges of getting the studio and equipment built on the roof of the MCH. To overcome this all studio kit and the lighting rig had to be lifted by crane in the early hours of the morning. MCH is a historic building and was not actually designed

to host a studio operation with all that entails so Presteigne had to work sympathetically with the building – the Gallery was in a broom cupboard and the racks lined the corridor outside with all cables flown from a window to the roof. All of this activity was project managed by Presteigne observing the strict health and safety protocols required to deliver a live show in a complex physical space.

The studio provided the anchor throughout the BBC’s coverage on the day of Her Majesty’s funeral, with a total on air time of nine hours.

Equipment supplied included:

  • Small Production Studio Facility including gallery

  • 4 Sony HDC 3500 Cameras

  • Cannon CJ20 and CJ12 4K Lenses

  • Osprey Pedestals

  • Jimmy Jib

  • Prompt System

  • Sennheiser Radio Microphones

  • Wisycom IEMs

  • Calrec Brio Audio Desk

  • RTS Odin Communications Matrix

  • Radio Talkback

  • Ross Carbonite Vision Mixer

  • Ross Ultrix Router