The helicopter team that films the Tour de France
> Two AS355s serve as the video-copters, [...] An AS350 serves as a relay helicopter, equipped with VHF antennas that receive and transmit live feeds from the AS355s, as well as ground cameras on motorcycles.<p>> Circling at 2,000 feet (600m), the relay helo takes camera feeds and sends them to a fixed-wing aircraft flying higher at 10,000 to 25,000 feet (3,000-7,600m), depending on weather.<p>> The airplane sends the combined feeds back down to two receive trucks located along the race course. The trucks act like signal repeaters, the first sending video to a satellite that sends it back to the second truck further along the course, which finally forwards the signal to the town where the finish line is located.<p>> With stages of varying terrain up to 140 miles (225km) long, this hop-skip method ensures the best video fidelity with the least time-lag.<p>Knowing next to nothing about production video transmission, this seems overly complicated to me with several points of failure. I wonder how much of this article is editorialized and mixing up backup/redundant methods vs actual implementation?<p>The part about relaying between trucks using satellites seems especially strange, if the goal is to reduce time lag. Why are trucks needed to relay a satellite signal at all?  Why can't the video-copters send direct to the fixed wing aircraft, or to the satellites? Why can't the fixed wing aircraft be used as a single hop?<p>If this is accurate, it makes me wonder how much of this setup is "we've been doing it this way for x years, and it works, so don't we mess with it" vs how it would be done with a modern, best-practices design. Anyone that's done this kind of work care to weigh in?