There’s a moment during the Amsterdam 750 finale where Edsilia Rombley’s voice filled the cathedral-sized tent on Museumplein, but she wasn’t there. The video feed cut to her standing on top of the Johan Cruijff Arena, singing live, her voice soaring across the city through our systems. For once, I wasn’t listening critically, wasn’t mentally adjusting frequencies or worrying about latency. Just goosebumps. The voice, the presence, the audacity of the production - it all just worked. Sounded and looked terrific.
That’s what happens when you build a communication infrastructure designed for scale. Ten antenna pairs, 500 meters of fiber, 200 meters of cat6a snaking across the Museumplein, through mud, under staging, around a transparent tent the size of a decent theater. We weren’t there to solve specific problems - we built a matrix architecture where anyone could talk to anyone. Show-callers coordinating drone shots, pyro cues, the fireworks finale, all happening simultaneously across multiple channels. The production had several teams managing different aspects, and our job was to make sure none of them ever had to think about whether their voice would reach the right person.
The TV crew ran their own separate intercom system - their chatter is a completely different animal from live production. We only had an assistant director on our lines to bridge between the two worlds. Even the audio splits for broadcast were done at the analogue stage, so we weren’t sharing gains or fighting over control. When you have this many RF sources in the air - wireless mics, IEMs, drones, broadcast feeds, our intercom - you coordinate early or you fail spectacularly. We sorted out frequency allocations in the final days before the show, once the tent and stages were up and we could physically talk to every crew’s RF person through the production company.
My role during the show was roaming between antenna locations, indoor and outdoor, making sure nothing obvious had gone wrong. Cables unplugged, connections damaged, that kind of thing. It gave me time to actually watch parts of the performance, though I was never fully immersed. I’m constitutionally incapable of just listening - I’m always identifying details that could sound better, mentally mixing the room. But that Edsilia moment broke through all of that.
The load-out had its own poetry, the kind that only makes sense if you’ve done this work. There’s this philosophy: it’s fun because it’s not fun, which makes it fun again. Unplugging cables, winding them onto reels, that part is straightforward. But dragging 500 meters of fiber through mud, under flooring sections, beneath trucks, carefully avoiding 1000-amp distro units, that’s where it gets interesting. The security team had parked their coordination semi-trailer right on top of some of our cable runs. They promised they’d be first out. Naturally, that didn’t happen. We pulled what we could from under the trailer, then just waited for them to move.
The real character-building experience was this ten-meter stretch of former Museumplein grass that had been absolutely demolished into thick brown sludge. Completely uncalled for at a prestigious event with the king and queen in the front row, but there we were. Every crew member tried desperately to avoid it, and every single one of us failed because there was simply no way around it. It ruined my work boots - nothing a sponge and clean water couldn’t eventually fix, but still. Four of us on the intercom crew, people I’d worked with before, keeping to ourselves mostly. There’s no time or need to be chatty on shows like this. We’re there in support, making sure the invisible infrastructure never becomes visible.
The tent finally came down, the cables all wound up, the antenna pairs packed away. Somewhere in there, between the mud and the methodical work of breaking down a system that had just coordinated a national television broadcast with drone shots and pyrotechnics and a live feed to someone singing on top of a football stadium, I thought about Edsilia’s voice cutting through all that complexity. That’s what we’re there for - to make the impossible look effortless.