Short answer: in Turkey the main licence-exempt band for wireless microphones is 470-694 MHz, with a ceiling of 50 mW e.r.p. Channel count does not come from the number of speakers on your run sheet. It comes from how many microphones must be live at the same moment, plus at least one spare transmitter. A session with a moderator and three panellists is six channels once you add the two floor mics for Q&A, not four. Table 10 of BTK's technical criteria for radio equipment exempt from frequency assignment lists the permitted bands one by one: 470-694 MHz at 50 mW e.r.p., 863-865 MHz at 10 mW e.r.p., 1785-1795, 1795-1800 and 1800-1804.8 MHz at 20 mW e.i.r.p., and 174-216 MHz at 50 mW e.r.p. Nothing above 694 MHz appears on that list apart from 863-865 MHz, which means the old 800 MHz bodypacks sitting in storage have no legal home in Turkey any more. Below: channel maths, microphone type selection, the legal bands, RF scanning, intermodulation, antenna placement and the show-day plan.
How many channels do you need? Count live mics, not speakers
Channel count is not the length of your speaker list. It is the number of microphones that have to be open simultaneously. A single-presenter keynote is two channels: one lavalier on the speaker and one handheld waiting at the lectern. A panel with a moderator and three guests is four lavaliers, and if you are taking questions from the room, two more handhelds, so six. At an awards night the host holds one mic, a second sits at the wing already tuned to its channel, and a third goes to whoever collects the award. Programmes with parallel breakout rooms need a separate system per room, because the same frequency cannot run in two rooms at once. The working rule: count the simultaneously live mics, add twenty percent, round up, and never sign off a plan with no spare. One warning about sharing. Handing a single transmitter to two speakers who follow each other looks like a saving on paper and is not one in the room. Fitting a lavalier and hiding the cable takes two or three minutes, and the stage is silent for all of them. Crew and production radios are a separate system and never belong in the microphone channel count.
Handheld, lavalier or headset: which one belongs where?
These three are not interchangeable. A handheld is the most reliable of the three, because the speaker controls the distance and it works close to the mouth, so you can keep gain low. Feedback risk is at its lowest here. The cost is one occupied hand, which becomes a problem the moment someone needs a slide clicker or notes. A lavalier disappears on camera and frees both hands, but it sits 20 to 25 centimetres from the mouth. You close that gap by raising gain, and higher gain lowers the feedback threshold and makes fabric and jewellery rustle audible. Clip it at tie-knot height or mid-chest rather than on the lapel, and clear away necklaces and hair clips. A headset sits closest to the mouth, gives you the largest gain margin, and is the only correct answer for a moving host, a trainer, or any format with movement. In exchange it is visible on camera, so ask for a skin-tone model. There is a separate question for the rehearsal: where does the transmitter go? A dress with no pockets, or a shirt with no jacket, means a waist strap or a thigh strap. Discovering that on show morning is not the plan.
Which frequencies are legal in Turkey? The BTK exempt band list
The band your wireless microphone runs on is a regulatory question, not a design preference. BTK's published technical criteria for radio equipment exempt from frequency assignment sets out the wireless microphone bands and their power limits in Table 10. The main professional band is 470-694 MHz at a maximum of 50 mW e.r.p., with TS EN 300 422 as the reference standard. Alongside it sit 863-865 MHz at 10 mW e.r.p. (including wireless audio and multimedia streaming), the 1785-1795, 1795-1800 and 1800-1804.8 MHz ranges at 20 mW e.i.r.p., and on the VHF side 174-216 MHz at 50 mW e.r.p. plus 29.7-47 MHz at 10 mW e.r.p. Equipment that stays inside those bands and power limits is exempt from radio installation and operating permits and from frequency assignment and registration. Digital systems working at 2.4 GHz fall outside this table and share their spectrum with Wi-Fi. In a small training room that is fine. At a dealer meeting for three hundred people, several hundred phones fill the same band, so do not trust your main stage microphone to 2.4 GHz. When you request a rental quote, brand and model are not enough; ask for the operating band in MHz in writing.
If your microphone is an 800 MHz unit, you cannot use it. What is the penalty?
This is the most common compliance gap in Turkey. BTK's public notice titled Kablosuz Mikrofon Kullanıcılarının Dikkatine (To the attention of wireless microphone users) sets out the sequence. The authorisation tender held on 26 August 2015, known publicly as the 4.5G tender, assigned 790-862 MHz, the 800 MHz band, to three mobile operators for mobile broadband. Before that, the Short Range Devices Regulation published in Official Gazette no. 28408 of 11 September 2012 had already narrowed the wireless microphone allocation inside 800 MHz from 790-862 MHz down to 823-832 MHz, and use of those frequencies ended after 1 January 2015. The same notice states the enforcement position plainly: where field measurements detect wireless microphone signals in 790-862 MHz, action will be taken under article 63, fourth paragraph of Electronic Communications Law no. 5809, which provides for a judicial fine of up to two thousand days for operating radio equipment that requires a permit and licence without one. Checking is easy. Read the label and the manual, where the tuning range is printed in MHz. Do not rely on manufacturer letter codes such as A, B, G or J, because the same letter maps to different ranges across models and countries. If you are buying secondhand, or a subcontractor is supplying the kit, put the band in the contract.
Why does TV broadcasting break your microphone? Scan before you trust the band
The 470-694 MHz range is not a corridor reserved for wireless microphones. Terrestrial television lives there too. Analogue terrestrial broadcasting is still on air in Turkey; RTÜK has published its national DVB-T2 frequency plan, but the switchover is not finished. So which TV channels are active in the city hosting your event determines how much room is left for you. That makes an RF scan the first job of the load-in, using the receiver's own scan function or an external spectrum analyser to read the band and mark the clear pockets. Metan Teknik's technical note on this band recommends leaving at least 200 kHz, and preferably 400 kHz, of buffer away from TV carrier frequencies. The same note points out that risk rises sharply outdoors and anywhere with a clear line of sight to a TV transmitter. In practice, a rooftop event facing the Çamlıca transmitter in Istanbul and a basement ballroom are not the same calculation. Do not scan once and walk away. A reading taken in an empty room misleads you, because a crowd of bodies absorbs UHF. Scan at the end of the build, then verify again just before doors. And ask the venue one more question: is there another event in the adjacent hall that day? If so, their microphones are in your band too.
How many channels fit in one band? Intermodulation and the frequency plan
A band that looks empty is not an invitation to add microphones indefinitely. When two transmitters run together, intermodulation products appear at the sums and differences of their frequencies. If one of those ghost signals lands on a third channel, that channel crackles, drops syllables or dies outright. This is why frequencies are chosen to be mathematically compatible rather than picked at random. Channel density depends on the class of system. As a reference point, the published specifications for Shure's SLX-D+ series state a 138 MHz tuning range with up to 11 simultaneous systems in 6 MHz TV bands and up to 14 in 8 MHz TV bands. Since the terrestrial TV channel raster in Europe and Turkey is 8 MHz, the second figure is the one that concerns you. Shure's technical writing notes that digital systems generate fewer intermodulation products than analogue ones and can therefore be packed on more closely spaced frequencies. Once you pass eight channels, the era of individual whip antennas is over: without antenna distribution and directional antennas, sixteen antennas on eight receivers will smother each other. Build the frequency plan with coordination software before show day, write it to the transmitters, and leave the keypad lock engaged. If you are running in-ear monitors, they take room in the same spectrum and belong in the same plan as the microphones.
Range is set by line of sight, not by watts: antenna placement
50 mW is a small amount of power, and what determines range is not the power but what stands in the way. Shure puts it directly in its wireless design guidance: maintaining a line-of-sight connection between transmitter and receiver antennas is critical to success, and camouflaging antennas to satisfy aesthetic concerns should never be allowed to compromise wireless performance. The most common site error is leaving the receivers next to the mixing desk at the back of the room. Instead of expecting RF to travel forty metres from the stage, bring the antennas to the stage edge and carry audio back to the desk on cable. If you need a long RF run, do the loss calculation, choose low-loss cable, and add an antenna amplifier where required. LED walls, metal truss, the steel frame behind the set and the audience itself all absorb or reflect UHF, so never park an antenna behind an LED wall or hard against a metal panel. Do not tape two antennas together and expect diversity to work; separate them by several wavelengths and angle the tips. Transmitter placement matters as much: clipped to the middle of a speaker's back, the pack shields its own signal with the body. Move it to the side, at the belt.
Show-day plan and what to demand in the quote in writing
Put the battery plan on paper. The same SLX-D+ specifications quote up to 8 hours of use from two AA cells, and up to 5.5 hours for the portable receiver model. Even so, do not run batteries to the end of their life during an event. Fit fresh cells at the start of each session, drop the used ones in a separate box, and on rechargeable systems watch each transmitter's status from the receiver screen. The spares rule is simple: at least one of every microphone type, waiting at the stage wing, switched on and already tuned. Swapping a microphone while a speaker is on stage is a ten-second job, but two minutes if the spare is sitting switched off in a case. Open every microphone at once during the rehearsal. Eight channels tested one at a time will all behave; intermodulation only shows up when they are live together, so the simultaneous test is the real one. Keep one person responsible for RF on site, because the engineer at the desk cannot chase the mix and the frequencies at the same time. When you collect quotes, ask in writing for: channel count and microphone types, operating band in MHz, whether the receivers are digital or analogue, whether antenna distribution and directional antennas are included, who performs frequency coordination, the number of spare transmitters, the battery and charging plan, in-ear monitor channel count, and the technical crew on site. Tales Event works out of Istanbul and delivers sound system rental, wireless microphones, in-ear monitoring and simultaneous interpretation setups across Turkey with a single team. Send us the venue name, the speaker running order and the headcount, and we will come back with a channel plan and a frequency coordination proposal.
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