tweak'e

sorry, forgot to post that it was fixed. lead to monitor which was split off the camera line was intermittently shorting from shield to centre. installed a proper active splitter which kept it isolated so it only effected the screen. just had to custom make a cable for the screen.

very funny. got to love the ..."was that so hard" however none of that will help. thats only for data that is deleted not overwritten.

theres nothing us mere mortols can do to get the data back. once overwritten thats it. i've heard of some techniques where they can retrieve data thats been overwritten. but i'm guessing thats going to cost more than a subway shop. i havn't heard if the tech still works with modern drives either as the way they work has changed a bit over the years. anyway its not something your going to get easy or cheap access to.

hows the adsl connected tot he tv ? do you have tv over internet, cable tv or media pc ? off the top of my head the IR on the camera is causing the power supply to go noisy and you probably have a ground loop or power cable close to adsl line. depends a bit on what device(s) have the adsl connect to them and how the interfeernce is getting to it (through earths or radiated) a simply way would be try changing the power supply for camera or fit isolator on the camera feed.

The IC Realtime has a speed-bump cameras are no joke...... They are in use by the US Military and the Secret Service for under under vehicle inspection. One advantage in using these camera is they are very inconspicuous. the cameras themselves are not a problem, just speed bump tend to look at the front and along the bottom at an angle. where you really need to be looking straight up and with a camera above ground its going to be tricky to get the width of view without distortion. i would imagen that they would have the cameras under the ground looking up. hold the vehicle at the barrier while they look via the cameras. you would want to see the whole vehicle in the screen(s) while its stationary, not try and view it as the vehicle drives over the camera.

how well lit is the aera. possibly not enough light and they are switching to B/W.

i think that sort of project calls for a lot more than speed bump cams. high quality detail without distortion (ie no curved look due to wide angle lens). hopefully someone has some neat tricks for these sorts of setups.

RUN ! seriously, thats the sort of job you pass on. consequences of any failures could be seriously nasty for a lot of people and including yourself should they take it out on the installer. i can't imagen it being to hard to design something to work tho i would go for far more cameras so it can cover very wide vehicles and ones that are not positioned very well above the cameras. i assume you have some way to stop the vehicles in roughly the correct spot (ie barrier arm controlled by security staff) you will want very good detail and to have good focus control as vehicles vary in height off the ground. not the sort of job i would want as a new employee!

what are they looking for under the vechile? bombs, drugs....?? is it just for viewing (ie by guards) or just for recording?

that looks like a compression problem. the codec is either not set up correctly or processor has a problem with data flow (can't handle spikes in data flow when objects are moving. i understand thats typical of eg using mpeg2 chips to encode mpeg4 or underpowered cpu)

installed and quick test. it seams to work ok. i have a broken lead to the screen which must have been casueing the dvr not to record that camera. now the dodgy lead doesn't effect the dvr pics.

my system splits one video feed off to a monitor before the dvr. just using couple of plugs at the moment. however sometimes the monitor plugs come loose and upsets the video feed. just wondering is a proper active video splitter would isolate the DVR from the monitor so the monitor can be unpluged without upsetting recoding pics.

i'm not that well up on video signal (used to RF) but RG6 is better than RG59. simply lower wire resistance over long runs. most of the time RG59 is fine unless your doing massive long runs and RG59 is cheaper. brands, for longer runs avoid cheap stuff. you can get under sized centre conductor and poor insulation. for short runs the difference between brands will be barely measurable. lower frequency's rely a lot more on the shield and the quality of the insulation between centre core and shield. typically the insulation is foam but air core is common in some markets. however it can be different size cable and require different sized connectors. i personally don't like air core due to moisture being able to run down the inside of the cable. i have seen another cable used which is smaller than RG59. often twisted centre conductor. no idea on specs etc.

one camera market that is growing is the automotive side. cheap small high quailty WDR cameras. as cars are becoming more and more commonly fitted with cameras, solid sate storage becoming bigger and cheaper, i think the crash camera or DVR will become a lot more common. lets face it, it would get far more use than your house surveillance would. the only other thing i would like to see is the cheaper digital output non-IP cameras, digital replacement for the analog cameras.

i just picked up the ones thats pictured. current draw is listed at 40ma. it takes 12v or 24vac. however i wonder if its ok with vehicle powersupply ie 11-14v ? i can run it off regulated DVR power but if DVR goes down i loose ability to view the camera. also quick test showed all earths are common on it so not fully isolated

any chance you know the current draw of that splitter?

simply don't give them the fine detail. for another business we never used to put to much detail into the quotes. not because of reasons above but rather due to the fact the jobs always changed when you actually got into it. if you spec things to hard in the quote can get you into crap when you have to use different gear to fix a problem.

sure you can tweak things a fair bit. BUT the big problem is how much data you have to work with. a single frame from a medium res analog camera is not a lot of data. theres not much you can do with a 50kB jpeg compared to say a 3000kB jpeg.

one of the problems with lightning is that it raises the ground potential so lightning will often look for another path ie through the cameras. all ican suggest is to not make the camera stick out on its own, keep it close to the structure. hopefully their lightning conductor is nice and straight. you can fit AV surge protectors at camera, mayby at the bottom of t he pole where the cable will go across to the building and dvr end. try to keep cables straight and the earths nice and straight. also isolators will help. the power supply side gets a little tricky i would try to isolate it as much as possible and fit lighting protectors. the last thing you want is have lightning travel back down your power and video cable and set fire to the building etc. i've had a few places where the tv aerial has been hit and very lucky not to have set the place on fire.

If you get really serious, use a solid state disk drive. Best, Christopher you still have the problem of the hardrive caddy coming loose. SSD may not even work as they are untested. not to mention the $$$ but biggest problem is availability, IDE SSD are rare around here. DVR's generally don't play nicely with IDE-SATA converter cards.

well they are sold as an automotive system, they are meant to be specially designed as an automotive dvr. the mounts are only basically a stack of rubber washers. nothing fancy at all. had thought of using RC car shock absorbers if i got really serious about it.

Scruit..... can you mount it up under the rear parcel shelf? if there is no where to mount it flat then forget using stock mounts. make your own setup. i've got mine partly on 2" foam rubber.

Scruit is not the only one with the problem. mine does the same tho not as bad. mine is also mounted vertically simply due to lack of room. however my mounting system is somewhat more complex than Scruit's. its still a work in progress and today cut out for 3 minutes. trying new hardrive, it tends to be more prone to loosing data. i get lots of stop starts (lose about 5 secs of footage each time). SSD may not solve the problem if the data loss is due to the cradle loosing contact.

if he can buy the gear cheaper elsewhere and get labour cheaper then your charging to much. thats the whole idea of getting quotes. if they have bought cheap nasty gear and cheap know nothing labour then the job will reflect that and odds are you will get a repair job out of it later on. DIY's i have no problem with and will help out as much as i can. you where never going to get the job out of them anyway but if you ignore them you will get no work from anyone. the only ones that piss me right off is the pro's who do that. ie a sparky that wants you to design it all so they can install it and make themselves the $$$. worse is the ones that install it all then when it doesn't work tell the customer to get a professional in to fix it ! i've even had the cheaky buggers wanting me to teach them how to do my job ! ! ! FFS !

+1 in my old job 90% of the work was just that. some of the worse where brand new apartment buildings that they had gone cheap and used under rated cable. they had to cut all the walls open and pulled all new cable through. the repair cost would have cost 3-4x what they paid for the whole job to start with. in some contract work, a lot of the contractors used to skip all the customer training part. used to get heaps of usage related call backs. the worse bit of it all was the mickey mouse brigade used to do all the easy stuff, make 80% of the $$$ and you got to repair it all, do all the hard work and make 20% of the $$$.