kybunpark, St.Gallen

The kybunpark (until 2016: AFG Arena) is the football stadium of FC St.Gallen 1879 in Winkeln, in the west of the city of St.Gallen. At 652 meters above sea level, it is the highest stadium in Swiss professional football. After almost ten years of planning under the leadership of Hans Hurni, the ground-breaking ceremony for the new football stadium with a capacity of 20,200 spectators and the shopping arena took place on September 14, 2005.

Initial situation/requirements:

The multimedia experience at a football match and at congress events is becoming increasingly important. The infrastructure, some of which dates back to 2008, therefore had to be brought up to the latest state of the art. In stadium technology, audio-video signals often pass through many instances before they become visible or audible. Nevertheless, the operation should be simple and the personnel costs should be kept within limits. The modernization of the public address and evacuation system as well as the entire congress technology took place during ongoing operations over various stages from summer 2022 to spring 2024. 

Technical implementation:

Renovation of the stadium sound system: Kilchenmann calculated three variants as part of a preliminary project - and based on the existing cabling options. The final variant contains 60x directional coaxial high-performance loudspeakers for music and speech. Bass support is provided by 12x woofer systems, both with appropriate weather protection to guarantee a safe and durable system. Signal processing and distribution are carried out via audio processors and an audio network and are designed to be redundant. The newly designed evacuation system also has the highest priority and mutes the event and congress components in the event of an evacuation. A digital 24-channel event mixer was integrated for mixing the sources and moderation in the various zones of the entire stadium.

A special feature was the ability to adjust the often sought-after optimum volume on the spot using a remote control unit. The total output of the sound system is around 100,000 watts, ensuring a good atmosphere in the kybunpark.

The congress rooms were also brought up to the latest state of the art. In addition to high-resolution video technology and broadband audio transmission, Kilchenmann also made central control possible. The entire media technology is operated and switched via a touch panel - be it a single screen or presets that switch the entire stadium to different operating modes. For example, individual preset settings for "before the game", the press conference or room networking for congress applications can be saved and called up.

All audio-video components are networked via a self-sufficient 10 GB fiber optic technology network. This bandwidth also makes it possible to transmit multiple audio-video streams with resolutions of up to 4K and with minimal delay - whether for football or congress operations. The signal distribution of the displays in the boxes or in the corridors takes place via the in-house "TV-television" coax network. The feed and signal conversion are solved with a modulator specially designed for live applications, which makes the signal from the control room quickly available on the "TV". Around 130 displays with diagonals of 43 - 98 inches are in use. For outdoor use, extra robust and weatherproof displays were used, which can provide the necessary brightness even in direct sunlight.

The planning of the control room was also discussed to ensure that the needs of both the operation and the crew were optimally taken into account. Despite limited space, a good workflow was made possible. The cabling of the control room and camera preparation, cross-trade schematic documentation and labeling work rounded off the implementation.

Annual maintenance, on-call service and match support as required help FC St.Gallen 1879 to keep its systems reliably operational and to optimize them on an ongoing basis.