Five Q-SYS Conference Rooms in a County Emergency Operations Center: Redwood City, California

The situation

The County of San Mateo runs its Department of Emergency Management out of 501 Winslow Street in Redwood City, on the first floor of the County Center. Five rooms on that floor do the work when something happens: a departmental conference room, a policy room where decisions get made, a joint information center where public messaging is written, and two breakout rooms that open into one another when the incident needs the space.

The AV in those rooms was several years old and the proposal is blunt about the reason for replacing it: the QSC Core 110f processors in the rack room were no longer supported. Amplifiers, ceiling speakers and the ceiling microphone in each room were on the same clock. The county did not want a redesign; the proposal describes updating the entire system with a one-for-one replacement using current hardware and extended warranties where available.

What makes that ordinary refresh less ordinary is the room list. A policy room and a joint information center are not general-purpose meeting rooms. They are fitted out like conference rooms, but they work like a command center. They are needed on the day everything else is going wrong, which is the worst possible day to discover that a processor has gone end-of-support. That is the assumption behind our government technology work: a public-safety room has to work on its worst day.

What made it hard

Five rooms, four processors. The two breakout rooms — 136C and 137B — share a single Q-SYS Core and a combine-and-divide program, so the design is not five copies of one room. It is three standalone rooms plus a pair that has to behave as two independent systems or one larger one depending on the partition, with touch panels that show the user which state the pair is in.

Everything else had to reuse what was already in the building. The kickoff record settles it point by point: reuse the existing cable runs, reuse the existing HDMI and USB-A at the table, reuse the existing cable cubbies, reuse the county's own room PCs. The only new table connectivity was USB-C, because that is what people actually arrive with now.

This is also a public works contract. The county agreement carries the California prevailing wage provisions under Labor Code section 1770 and requires Department of Industrial Relations registration, with compliance monitoring by the DIR. That is not a technical constraint, but it is a scheduling and administrative one, and it belongs in the plan from the first day rather than the last.

How we designed it

Every room got the same standard so that a user who can run one can run all five. Each has a 75 inch Avocor AVK-7510 display on a Chief LTM1U tilt mount, a Shure MXA920W-S square ceiling array, four QSC AD-C6T-ZB-WH zero-bezel ceiling speakers and a QSC NC-12x80 PTZ camera. Each also has a QSC SPA2-60 amplifier and a QSC TSC-101-G3 ten-inch touch panel on a TSC-710t-G3 table mount.

The camera is the part worth explaining. Its presets are driven from the ceiling microphone's gating, so the shot follows whoever is speaking without anyone touching a control. In an emergency operations room that matters more than it does in a sales meeting: the person briefing is rarely the person sitting nearest the camera, and nobody is going to stop to drive a PTZ.

Video moves on Q-SYS network endpoints rather than on a matrix. A QSC NV-32-H in the rack handles source switching and AV bridging for each room. NV-21-HU endpoints sit at the table and behind the display. Wireless presentation is a Barco ClickShare CX-50 Gen2 per room. An occupancy sensor wakes and sleeps each system through Q-SYS, so a room left running at the end of a long night turns itself off.

The touch panel was kept to one working page behind a welcome screen, and our Q-SYS control programming keeps the layout the same in every room. Source buttons cover ClickShare, table HDMI and table USB-C, with cable TV added in room 130A. Camera presets, privacy mute, volume and shutdown sit on the same page. When the breakout pair is combined, the panel in 136C tells the user to run the room from 137B.

Four choices were considered and rejected at kickoff and are worth recording: no scheduling panels (the county had no requirement), non-touch displays rather than interactive ones, existing county PCs reused rather than new room compute, and existing HDMI and USB-A cabling kept with only USB-C added. Every one of those decisions took cost out without taking capability out. Our design and integration team would rather spend the budget on the processor that has to last than on a panel outside a door.

Equipment by room

Three rooms are identical. The breakout pair shares one processor between two otherwise identical rooms. Quantities below are the project totals from the pick list and the closeout serial sheet.

For comparable rooms, the categories to start from are commercial displays, ceiling and conference microphones and AV network hardware.

Network and IT

Two Netgear M4250 26G4F PoE++ switches carry the whole floor, each with a 1,440 watt power budget. Rooms 130A, 140B and 141B hang off the first switch; the breakout pair hangs off the second. One deliberate cross-connection exists and is drawn on the as-built: the IR interface that sits in the 130A rack takes its network from port 23 of the second switch.

The closeout carries a device-by-device IP schedule — every Core, endpoint, camera, touch panel, display and microphone named and addressed, with a separate Dante address for each Shure array. Room 130A sits on its own subnet; the other four rooms and both switches share another. Every ceiling microphone therefore appears twice in the list, once for control and once for Dante audio, which is exactly how a Q-SYS and Dante room should be documented.

Two things are missing from that schedule and are worth naming rather than glossing over: the VLAN, firewall, switch-port and patch-panel columns exist in the workbook but were left blank, and so were the MAC addresses. On a five-room emergency operations floor, that is the documentation we would go back and complete, because the next person to troubleshoot a port at two in the morning will not have the installing technician on the phone.

The rollout

The work took six days on site. Every shift started between 6:00 and 7:30 in the morning and finished by early afternoon. For a county building, that is the difference between working around the department and working through it.

The order was deliberate. Day one was a site walk and stripping owner-furnished equipment out of the rack. Day two took the old microphones, cameras and displays out of the breakout pair and put the new cameras, microphones, displays and table endpoints in. Day three replaced the speakers in the breakout rooms and in 140 and 141, toned every circuit, and finished the breakout rack. Day four did room 130 and the table peripherals across three rooms. Day five swapped the displays and cameras in the last three rooms and completed the rack work for 140 and 141. Day six installed the table USB-C cables, cleaned the rooms, and closed out the rack in 130.

Running through all six days is a task that never appears in a proposal and always takes longer than anyone budgets: identifying, re-lacing and re-labeling the existing cable in the IDF, one run at a time, because the reuse decision that saved the county a cable pull has to be paid back in tracing.

Support from here

The workmanship guarantee runs one year from the recorded first-use date, and it covers the installation workmanship and the programming source code — which matters more than it sounds, because a Q-SYS room is mostly software and a warranty that only covers boxes covers the cheap half. The displays carry five years: Avocor's standard three plus the two-year extension bought for each of the five rooms.

The service level in the proposal is the commercial tier: a priority-one issue gets a one-hour response, remote engagement within two hours, a resolution path within four, and an on-site technician within two business days. There is also a seven-day grace period from completion — anything found in the first week gets corrected at no cost, which is the window in which real users find what commissioning did not.

Remote monitoring was quoted as an option rather than included, and it needs a data collection appliance on the county network with an encrypted tunnel back to our service desk. For a floor like this one it is the option worth taking. Our maintenance program exists because rooms drift: a firmware update resets a mute group, a camera preset stops matching the seating, a display loses its input assignment after a power event. None of that announces itself. On an emergency operations floor, you find out on the day you cannot afford to.

Technology partners on this project

If your operations center is running processors past end-of-support, we can walk the floor with you and build a room-by-room inventory: what is in each rack, what is still supported, and which rooms have to stay live while the rest are rebuilt.

Creation Networks, Inc. — nationwide commercial AV integrator, CTS-D certified, based in Concord, CA and Incline Village, NV. Design, engineering, programming, installation, and support from a single point of contact. Call 888-230-3661 or email sales@creationnetworks.net.