River Oak Church’s new facility
USA - River Oak Church started as an offshoot from another church around 20 years ago in a school auditorium. They were soon able to start a multi part building project, first building a gymnatorium, and later offices and classrooms. In 2020, the growing church broke ground on a new, purpose-built facility in Chesapeake, Virginia, to house their burgeoning ministry.
When Justin Fugett was tapped to help bring River Oak Church’s new facility to life in 2021, he understood the importance of the intercom system from his experience as a freelancer working with local broadcast organisations and universities. River Oak was looking into getting wireless beltpacks to add to their system and Justin decided that Clear-Com’s Arcadia was the right fit for the church.
“Honestly, I feel like every church needs to know about Arcadia – it’s the absolute perfect fit for so many church applications. It has the flexibility and connections that we need, without the complexity of a matrix-based system. For an organization that gets a lot of their staffing from volunteers or part-time staff, Arcadia is an ideal combination of power, flexibility, and ease-of-use,” comments Justin.
FreeSpeak II was Justin’s introduction to Clear-Com systems and was his “go-to” wireless solution for freelance projects. He knew that River Oak Church would need a FreeSpeak system, and the opportunity to incorporate Dante, HelixNet, and 2W/4W into a single central station with Arcadia was game-changing for this project. “I fell in love with FreeSpeak II during my time at Regent University, and now with HelixNet in the same box, it’s been really awesome,” says Justin.
With Arcadia on the Dante network, it is able to send or receive any feed within the audio network. For River Oak Church this means that the service producer and ProPresenter operator can both hear and talk to the worship leader and MD through the monitor system, all interfaced via Dante.
The intercom system also includes the Clear-Com Encore analogue partyline system, mostly used backstage, and there are future plans to bring in the latest FreeSpeak system, FreeSpeak Edge, to augment the system.

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