I imagined my first true test of Gotenna would be during a festival downtown with friends or out on a hiking trip. Instead, it actually occurred during a conference earlier this week where I was working Audio/Visual at an auditorium, but I needed to stay in communication with a coworker who was receiving and aggregating the presentation files at the registration table.
Because my coworker was stationed at the registration area and I was in the conference hall, we weren’t able to remain in constant communications. To make matters more challenging, the conference center was a massive structure and cell phone signals were barely making intermittently, if it all. It wasn’t unusual for us to receive text message tens of minutes later after they were sent.
My coworker and I originally discussed using two-way radios but that idea was nixed rather quickly because of the noise and the need to discretely communicate while presenters were speaking.
While I usually carry one Gotenna with me in the hopes I’ll hear a random ‘shout’ (that hasn’t happened yet), this time I brought two more with me. I’m not sure what possessed me to do that, but I’m glad I did. After having him install the app, he looped his Gotenna around a belt loop and I had mine over my camera bag. Another was clipped onto the back of a display at the exhibit hall and set to relay mode.
The devices worked flawlessly. While we weren’t going for distant records, we were able to remain in discrete communication despite at a few points, being in complete opposite corners of the conference center. There were a few times where our messages were relayed by the spare node which was pretty awesome. None of our messages ever came back as undelivered.
This is the first truly spontaneous field use I’ve had using Gotenna and it worked flawlessly.
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