The Hardware Quality Imperative
As things heat up for the spring meeting season, I thought it would be worth taking a few minutes to look at the current state of hardware. The reason for this is simple. If your audience voting hardware underperforms, your interactive meeting takes a black eye. And rest assured, there will be no shortage of embarrassment to go around.
Since I’m most familiar with the USA market, I’ll focus on the Fleetwood Reply platform, which is considered the industry workhorse. Standard Reply first surfaced in the mid-80’s as the wireless alternative to an otherwise wired world. Although eight different channels were available, changing a channel in the field was not possible, and changing a keypad number required fiddling with dip-switches.
The last twenty years have brought a product that now allows the channel and keypad numbers to be entered on the keypad itself. More important though, the last three years have brought us a far more reliable system than ever before.
I’m the first to admit that the Reply system has always been a solid performer. But since we are dealing with radio based technology, getting a system to perform its best in an unknown environment (meeting room) has always been a mix of both science and art. We saw a major improvement in system performance a few years ago when Fleetwood released a channel selectable version that also increased transmit power. Bingo, it was just what the audience response industry needed.
But as with any new design, there were a few issues to be resolved. None were severe. In fact I’d classify them as nuisances more than anything else. In the early going I tended to see keypads that needed more frequent tuning than before. And for a period, I saw a higher than average out-of-box failure rate. But those days are gone.
Over the past two months, we (Audience Response Rentals) have purchased a few hundred keypads, more than enough to draw conclusions. Of these, we didn’t have a single failure, nor did we have a single keypad that was out of tune. I know that Fleetwood has invested heavily in quality improvements – manufacturing processes and test equipment. I think those investments are paying off. I’m truly impressed with Reply’s flawless performance, and respect this platform’s contribution to the industry.
We don’t have first hand information on Fleetwood’s newest product, Reply IQ. But, we will before long.
Since I’m most familiar with the USA market, I’ll focus on the Fleetwood Reply platform, which is considered the industry workhorse. Standard Reply first surfaced in the mid-80’s as the wireless alternative to an otherwise wired world. Although eight different channels were available, changing a channel in the field was not possible, and changing a keypad number required fiddling with dip-switches.
The last twenty years have brought a product that now allows the channel and keypad numbers to be entered on the keypad itself. More important though, the last three years have brought us a far more reliable system than ever before.
I’m the first to admit that the Reply system has always been a solid performer. But since we are dealing with radio based technology, getting a system to perform its best in an unknown environment (meeting room) has always been a mix of both science and art. We saw a major improvement in system performance a few years ago when Fleetwood released a channel selectable version that also increased transmit power. Bingo, it was just what the audience response industry needed.
But as with any new design, there were a few issues to be resolved. None were severe. In fact I’d classify them as nuisances more than anything else. In the early going I tended to see keypads that needed more frequent tuning than before. And for a period, I saw a higher than average out-of-box failure rate. But those days are gone.
Over the past two months, we (Audience Response Rentals) have purchased a few hundred keypads, more than enough to draw conclusions. Of these, we didn’t have a single failure, nor did we have a single keypad that was out of tune. I know that Fleetwood has invested heavily in quality improvements – manufacturing processes and test equipment. I think those investments are paying off. I’m truly impressed with Reply’s flawless performance, and respect this platform’s contribution to the industry.
We don’t have first hand information on Fleetwood’s newest product, Reply IQ. But, we will before long.
