hardwired

DD-WRT really works well, I use it with the Windows VPN client and Dynamic DNS resolver (I use DynDNS), to dial into my home network. Using a VPN tunnel would allow you to leave the camera port settings unchanged and not forwarded to the WAN, which would probably make things easier (and safer from various forms of outside attacks).

What are the odds that cameras have back doors by design or otherwise? Fairly high, I would guess. Best, Christopher Worst case, someone could view and maybe mess with the camera settings... won't give them access to anything else on your network. There are exploits out that let someone do a remote NMAP scan of a local network through a HP printer... And HP probably has better written code than a lot of IP camera manufacturers out there. I'm for opening as few holes as necessary to the WAN, and using VPN applications wherever possible.

You could try using a laptop at the register location with another USB-232 adapter and hyperterminal, to feed test data back to the DVR. Also, connecting to the register with Hyperterminal and the laptop will let you see if you are getting any data at all (garbage, or wrong baud rate or parity), or nothing at all. That would help you eliminate other questions about your install, and narrow it down to odd output levels or data formats at the register output. You might want to ask the manufacturer if the outputs are TTL level voltages (not truly RS232, but some manufacturers use this for short links), rather than the standard higher voltage output. I'm like you, haven't had many problems using the standard T-tap approach, and at distances much further than recommended.... Hope you are able get it working!

The July average high temperature here is 96.6F, with peaks at 115F+.... We bake quite a few different cameras here. That really makes temperature failures inexcusable for Pelco, though, I have seen all their different models hanging on the outside of their building!

Fading fast here! By here, I meant regionally... Not in our office, for sure! About the only Pelco product I'll spec for a new install is the EH3512 enclosure. With something from Sanyo, Panasonic, Arecont (yes, I'm even placing Arecont over Pelco, now!), CNB, etc. in it!

No great loss I tend to agree, but we have customers here with several hundred of them in place that have issues that we have to address (on service contract). Even walking them in to Pelco's service department isn't what it used to be..... There is also a fair amount of brand loyalty to Pelco here, as they are one of our larger regional employers.

As far as cost, the Nitek 32 channel active receiver hub (also with ground loop isolation) is about $1000 less than the Pelco....I do agree that Nitek and NVT are probably overpriced, but I'm not sure that they are all the way into "Monster Cable" territory, as they do seem to have notably better performance, at least in our experience. I feel your pain on Pelco, I'm less than five miles from their headquarters, and I'm using less and less of their products, as both their quality and product availability are diminishing rapidly. Even very normal items (IS90, IS110 series domes, etc.) often have a lead time of weeks, now.....

I use a standard resolution laptop (and sometimes a tablet PC with 640*800 resolution) when setting up Arecont cameras. As Soundy noted above, you can always zoom into a specific area to fine focus (I try to pick an object that is easiest to make out changes in detail on, like a picket fence, etc.) As long as you zoom in enough to get at least a 1:1 ratio of pixels from the camera to pixels on the laptop (about 1/4 of the screen is usually enough), it's usually easy enough to focus..... Unless your hands are frozen, or you are standing on the top of a ladder holding the laptop in one hand and focusing with the other (look Ma, no hands!), sun glaring on the laptop screen, or doing the ever popular two installer "little more, too much, back a little, too far" routine, etc, which is why autofocus really is a nice feature! Some NVR software (Milestone and Exacq, at least), have a setup screen that will show the filesize coming from the camera. I often use this to fine focus, as largest filesize usually equals best focus (I know, iris settings, motion, and a lot of other things affect that too, but it usually works well).

I have been using baluns (active and passive) from Nitek for a long time, and been happy with the results. We have a hospital with over 150 channels, with runs between 500 and 2500 feet, using Nitek products for 6+ years. For a 1500' run, the VB37 (passive) at the camera end, and the TR515 (active) at the headend would be appropriate. There are cheaper brands out there, but Nitek (or NVT) have provided the best performance and reliability, in my experience.

Milestone is nice soft, but cameras license via MAC address.... If you want change camera, you will pay.... You do not have to pay to change cameras on a system, but you do have to go to the website to get a new licensing key when you change cameras on all of their software versions.. EXCEPT Go, that one is free, and does not require a visit to the website to change cameras (which is a significant advantage, on a demo system).

No, not in that one. (Well, maybe a really small one, but none of the circuitry is normally accessible, and I think the PIR and wireless are all on one board, it would require some hacking, at best...).

I had a customer with about 12 TD-20U PIR and receiver pairs calling PTZ presets, they ran about two years between battery changes with Lithium 9 volt batteries. I'd stick with outdoor rated PIR's, if at all possible, for temperature and false alarm considerations. ***Edit**** Where I'm at, we can't store perishable food outdoors year round

I've been getting good results with FA lenses from Fujinon and Kowa, both are pretty expensive, though. Another issue that I have been experiencing is sensor misalignment to the focal plane, one side of image always slightly out of focus, see sample here with significant focal shift. (Arecont 5105DN camera, Kowa LMVZ3510-IR Lens)

If it's just for up to a few IP cameras, get a decent mini-ITX PC (Core2 Duo, or so), and use Milestone "Go"- it's free, and does not require going to the company's website to change cameras on the license like their retail versions. The "Go" version allows for up to eight cameras, and five days of recording, should be enough for demo purposes.

I'd take a look at something like a pair of the Ubiquiti NanoStation Loco M5 radios ($79 ea MSRP, so $160 a pair to make an IP wireless bridge, maybe an Acti ACM-4201 with a better lens for the cam ($265 MSRP, but you can get it for less), or something similar, and run Milestone Xprotect GO (free) for recording/viewing on the laptop. With a 4.8 AH, 12 Volt battery (57.6 Watt-Hours), that should run the remote end for a little under seven hours (2.88 Watt cam, 5.5 watt radio). As far as licensing, the Ubiquiti radios are already FCC approved, no license necessary (the Ebay radios you mention are not, and with a high gain antenna will far exceed FCC maximum power limits, as well as usually really under performing (that was my polite way of saying they suck).

SpinRite has worked several times for me, I have also used HDDRegenerator, on the older Hiren's bootCD (It has a ton of other good utilities on it, too), and it's free....Google it.... The newer Hiren's has HDAT2 4.53, supposed to do the same thing, although I haven't tried it.

We paid a little less ordering them directly from CH, although that was in '09.....

A number of manufacturers OEM products from Phihong, I've used a lot of this one, http://www.phihongusa.com/html/psa16u-480_poe__15_4w_poe.html, usually available for $25.00 or so, you need to add a power cord, though.

Dunkin Donuts and Supercircuits are both owned by the Carlyle group, and according to a rep from Supercircuits, Carlyle bought them mostly to equip the doughnut stores with video, so they might have some info on that....

And you are also listening to "HARDWIRED", remember All of the products that have been mentioned have their place, but I have not found a better price to performance ratio than what I have found with Ubiquiti. Ubiquiti's 802.11 based system IS slightly proprietary in the "N" data rate range equipment, especially when using their "Airmax" TDMA settings to allow more units to connect per AP (up to about 100, compared to a standard "G" rate AP that chokes at 20-30 connections), it will not interconnect with any other manufacturer's equipment. Their "Airmax" setting also allows QoS (standard DSCP packet marking) on the over-the-air data. You could also shape the data on the LAN side, before the wireless, but when you have multiple remote units connecting, you (as the AP) would not know which unit to listen to first, without wireless side data shaping...

Milestone does need a separate "first day", and archive space, ideally you configure the fast storage space large enough to hold a full day of recordings, although in Professional and above, you can configure multiple archive times per day. It's a little different way of doing things, but it does allow the use of slower, file based storage (NAS,etc), rather than fast, block level access for all of the storage space, like Exacq requires. Some really old versions had a image/day limit, but no current versions do. The largest current install with Milestone I have is 53 cameras, that is on two different servers, running Enterprise version S/W. The largest single server install has 28 cameras, most megapixel, running about 90Mbps throughput, on a Q6600, 2.4 Ghz quad core with 2GB ram, running about 75% CPU or so. Milestone has a calculator on their site to help configure storage and server requirements.

We've been a Milestone dealer since 2007, and have had a pretty good overall experience with them. We are Exacq certified, too, with good experiences with them, as well. The Milestone "Essential" version has now made it a lot easier to sell, with a MSRP of $50 per channel, and has most features necessary for a smaller system (limited to 26 cameras, and five concurrent users). I happen to like Exacq as well, here are a few points of difference. +'s for Milestone... Essential is cheaper for a small system than Exacq Playback functionality is easier, with more features, with Milestone than Exacq. Viewing over a lower bandwidth (WAN) connection with Exacq client S/W is pretty painful waiting for a clip to buffer, especially megapixel. Milestone allows downsampling the video quality (on a per camera/per user basis, as well), for lower bandwidth connections, so megapixel viewing is easier. +'s for Exacq.... Setup for basic systems can be easier (although Milestone now has a wizard-based setup that helps) Tying multiple sites together is WAY cheaper in Exacq... Milestone requires Enterprise or Corporate for that, with a lot more cost and complexity. Processor overhead is almost nonexistent in Exacq, disk/LAN throughput seems to be the only limitation. Wan viewing through web works on just about any device (web on Milestone requires IE with plugins) Adding/deleting devices is quicker (Milestone requires registering the MAC of devices through their online registration) Both have their ups and downs, we will probably continue to sell both (until something better comes along )

Came into this thread a little late, but you might want to look at SentryScope, http://www.sentryscope.com/. It's a mirror swept linescan imager that gives a wide angle 21 Megapixel image, with recording done at the camera. A few other cameras, with the Kodak KAI-16000 16MP imager: Jai AB-1600GE, http://www.jai.com/EN/CameraSolutions/Products/Pages/AB-1600GE.aspx (Gig-E interface), and Lumenera Lw16059 http://lumenera.com/products/industrial-cameras/lw16059.php (USB interface).... But you'd have to hunt down a recording solution. Also worth looking at is Elphel, http://www3.elphel.com/, they are an open source vendor, with some really good ideas, they have also used the 16MP Kodak sensor, among other things.

Yeah, but I keep misspelling Ubiquiti.... I've only used a little bit of Tranzeo equipment, and it worked fine, but in the last couple of years, I have used Ubiquiti almost exclusively, either their integrated products (NanoStation, etc), or their mini-PCI radio cards (XR2,XR5,SR9), in Mikrotik Routerboards. PPS (packets per second) is more of a consideration when you are carrying a large quantity of small packets, which are more characteristic of VOIP transmission, and some types of Peer-to-Peer systems, but video is usually large packets. Video is (usually) where TCP throughput capability is more important, which is where Ubiquiti performs very well, at a very nice price point. The largest wireless ISP in my area (over 5000 subscribers) is beginning to change all of his gear over to Ubiquiti from Tranzeo as it ages, and for all new subscribers. If you can list out your requirements of distance and data rates needed, I'd be glad to share some product selections that I've been using in similar situations. You can also ask questions at Ubiquiti's forum, they are pretty helpful (they can be a little rough on people asking really stupid questions, but then again, we can be here, too!) at http://ubnt.com/forum/index.php

Be careful with this, now, because this is a function of the power supply itself, not the camera, and can vary from one to the next. I just recently had to rig up a power supply and the only one I had, had no barrel plug... so I found another barrel plug (recovered from a removed camera), and found that while the plug connected the white wire to the outside of the barrel, the power supply itself used the white-striped wire for positive (and the diagram on it showed it was originally a tip-positive unit). If you're splicing new barrels in, or snipping one off to just use the bare wires out of the wall-wart, always double-check polarity with your multimeter! +1, a number of wall warts I have come across have used the white stripe lead for negative, always check with a meter before you toast something expensive (some wall warts have ridiculously high unloaded/lightly loaded voltages, too, if you are using a very low current draw device, you could go outside it's voltage limits).