Patch Bay

The patch bay can look very confusing if you don't know what it's all about. But it works similarly to routing switcher (see that article below). Its main job is to provide access to inputs and outputs of the facility.

Everyone patch bay i've encountered (I'm not sure if everyone does it the same) has the signal flow the same way: FROM the top TO the bottom. In more technical terms, the top is the output and the bottom is the input for two corresponding patch bay nodes, meaning in the same column.

Here is what a patch bay looks like with a few cables plugged in:

Here is what a patch bay looks like lots of cables plugged in:

 As you can see, patch bays can be very helpful but they can get out of hand if no one maintains them to see if connections are still required. If a connection made with a patch bay becomes a permanent connection, it is a good idea to make that connection permanent behind the rack, clearing up space for more temporary fixes.

This is what the back of a professionally installed patch bay looks like.

Now for a closer look, here is what the nodes look like. Here you can see that we have a DA (distribution amplifier) hooked up to the patch bay.

So how this would work is, you plug a source, say a camera, into one of the DA SDI INs, which would be on bottom, they that feed becomes availible as an output on the top row for all the designated nodes.

Here is a more basic example: we have our SDI ROUTER OUTPUTS on top which you can see feed our CCU CAMERA RETURN INPUTS. So with a quick look at the patch bay you can see that Router Output 12 feeds Camera 12's Return. You can also see a cable coming out of #09, we have stolen that output for something else, so Camera 9 will not be getting it's return. You can also think of it as, we are sending Camera 9's feed somewhere else.

When nothing is plugged into either the output or input that pair is considered Normal. In the image above the only thing that is not normalized is the #09 SDI ROUTER OUTPUT. So for example, SDI ROUTER OUTPUT 10 feeds Camera 10 return, unless interrupted.

As you can see the patch bay is very instrumental to the operation of the facility for quick, temporary changes in the facilities signal flow.

I hope this helps, leave any corrections, comments or questions below :)