Congressional Hearings on Iraq

Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey of California had a problem...

For weeks, her staff had planned a hearing about bringing the troops home from Iraq. But as the September 2005 date approached, the Senate scheduled hearings for Supreme Court nominee John Roberts. Then Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast.

Worse yet, the event was slated for a remote room in the Canon House Office Building of the US Capitol, too small for a large audience and beyond the reach of the fiber optic network used to transmit Congressional events beyond Capitol Hill.

With two days before the event, communications chief Susannah Cernojevich called the live web casting team at New Media Mill.

Our team of technicians received clearance to mount the roof of the building with microwave transmitters. These inventive engineers have been dubbed the McGyver Squad, after the swashbuckling television figure who every week escaped certain death by fashioning all manner of electrical gizmos from ordinary household objects.

The McGyver Squad’s short distance, line-of-site microwave system was built to send broadcast signals from unlikely locations to our control room, where they can be encoded to web video.
And, that is just what happened during the Woolsey hearing, for five uninterrupted hours. By the end of the event, the offices of the congresswoman were overflowing with staffers from other congressional offices, who crowded around computer monitors to witness the VHS-quality web cast playing live from her congressional web site.