hardwired

About the best real world throughput on any standard A/B/G setup is going to be about 27-54Mbps, and in turbo/super modes, only half the normal channels will usually be available, due to using 40Mhz channel widths. Keep in mind, 300Mbps on "N" is not what you will get from end to end, that's the modulation rate. Real world throughput in "N" is likely to be 65-85Mbps or so. 5Ghz bands are almost always less polluted, as well as having more channels to choose from. You might do yourself a favor and just order up a pair of NanoStationM5's to test, the newest firmware also has a built in spectrum analyzer to see how much usage on different channels is in your area, and adjust around it. You might end up needing two AP's on different channels for the standard rate stuff, where you may only need one AP for the "N" rate products. As far as triggering events, if the cameras have digital I/O ports(most do), you can use event linking in Exacq to tie different events (motion detection, etc) to outputs on different devices.

The Ubiquiti products (NanoStationM5, etc) will talk to anything in the same product line at full "N" data rate, or other branded products at a reduced rate. In your application, the NanoStations can be configured as Access Point, Client, or any mix. You could use them in point to point, or multipoint bridging, depending on the angle and distance from each other. Take a look at all of the products in the "M" product group, the Nanostations are great for each remote location, but the BulletM5, or maybe two of them, with omnidirectional antennas, might be the way to go for the central recording access point. They should be able to easily support recording and viewing bandwidth for the application you are describing, at worst, you can throttle viewing bandwidth in Exacq to limit loading on the viewing side. If you could give us a rough layout showing each switch/wireless point, with distances and direction, we could probably work something up for you in regards to product choices.

------------------------------------------------------- Or get Oscilloscope and learn how to do the right way using multimeter to measure P-P kinda useless I'd second the fact that the camera master is probably the easiest way, the oscilloscope is the absolute best way to do it, (you could get a Velleman HPS10 for about $175.00 or so that would do fine for that purpose). The multimeter would be a very limited approach, because no basic multimeter is designed to display peak-to-peak voltages. Cheaper ones display an average, better ones display true RMS, but none of them will be able to take a waveform as complex as a video signal and come up with anything close to the correct reading. Some high end ones (Fluke, etc) list peak values as a feature, but they would cost more than a basic oscilloscope that would do it better, and the oscilloscope is valuable for other purposes, as well. Soundy, you are correct with the RMS to Peak to Peak conversion factor.... But, that is only valid for a sinusoidal waveform. A video waveform is very much NOT sinusoidal, and varies depending on Luma (mostly), and Chroma values (and others), in a way that make a fixed RMS-peak multiple pretty much impossible to determine.

How many cameras, what type (standard resolution or megapixel, etc), desired frame rate, and how many separate wireless points will be required, and do all of them have a clear line of sight back to the Access point/ recording location? The SkyPilot products do not seem to have any problems, but I do question if they might be overkill in your case. They also do not appear to be mesh, just point to multipoint, although with added synchronization features, compared to the Ubiquiti (the SkyConnector Mini seems to be a Ubiquiti Nanostation, with custom firmware modifications).

Exacq is almost totally limited by NIC and disk storage throughput as opposed to processor horsepower, you'll almost never come close to hitting even wimpy processor limits in almost any installs. BTW, Exacq has really helpful tech support, you might just want to call them about it. I'd thought about biting the bullet and spending the money for Exacq's hybrid server, until I figured out that you could add a 16 channel Acti encoder to your own box for much less, and only need one license for the encoder (as opposed to Milestone, and others, who charge by the channel). I have a 62 channel system retrofit/upgrade quoted that way right now, with the encoder and a mix of standard res IP and 1.3,3, and 8MP cams (Acti, Panasonic, and Arecont AV8365's), with a WHOLE lot of storage (48TB), but only a single Xeon processor (and the Exacq guy said that processor might be overkill!). It is a very fast RAID storage system, though. Unless you are going with really high framerates on all the cams, I'd think what you are suggesting for a system should be fine.

Jordan: I didn't think I was being very defensive, just reiterating the fact that Ubiquiti (and Mikrotik, among other) products have worked very well for me in my installations. Your conditions and requirements are likely not the same as mine, and everyone should know that YMMV, and buyer beware... Everyone should try, whenever possible, to personally test equipment before installing it at a customer site. Having said that, one of the greatest values that a forum group provides is distributing knowledge and experience with new products. The products that you recommended may very well be superior to Ubiquiti, I don't have any specific knowledge to say otherwise, BUT, they have a price point of over ten times+ the price of Ubiquiti product. Again, my customer base just doesn't support those costs. If your customers, or anyone else does have that budget capacity, then the other products might very well be the best choice for them. As far as cracking WPA2, that has only been done with weak passwords, and default SSID's that are included in rainbow tables. I use long, random passwords, changed SSID's, and I encourage everyone else to do the same. As far as esoteric packet injections, DOS attacks by forcing forged packets, etc. that are susceptibilities of the 802.11 protocol, I do not think I have one example of those attacks being used on any of my installations, or those of anyone I know. The biggest vulnerability around here is finding a .22 slug stuck in our equipment, or it just being gone when we go to check it, and I think that is the case for most installs. Rory: I agree, wireless is still my last choice option, but now with IP cameras being our company's first choice in new or retrofit installations, the options for data transport have opened up considerably compared to analog. I am now using Coax to IP converters, SDSL extenders over twisted pair cable, fiber, existing Ethernet connectivity, and other methods to move video around. Wireless for IP cameras also works immensely better than any previous analog wireless equipment I have ever used, and at less cost. BTW, I've come a lot closer to being killed by bad AC power wiring than anything RF so far

I'd go for the 24 Volt supply, the higher voltage equates to lower amperage, and thus less voltage drop, in the line. Also, you will have a little more room for losses in the cable, because the camera most likely internally regulates the input voltage back down to 12 Volts or so internally. As far as 12 Volt adapters, most unregulated ones will vary widely in their unloaded voltage (as you mentioned, 17 Volts or so), and thereby allowed the camera to work, where the (probably) regulated multiple output power supply started at 12 Volts, and then dropping too low at the camera end after cable losses to allow it to operate. Also, by using 24 Volt AC for cameras when possible, they will be less susceptible to ground loop problems that plague DC systems, especially when using a single power supply.

I'd have to disagree about using Ubiquiti, I have a reasonable number of installations using it with good results. I have never suggested that it is as good or better than some of the backhaul hardware manufacturers you have listed, but even in your quote, you mention that it is a decent product at a good price, and that is the equipment that most of us are needing in our day-to-day installs, not FCC licensed gigabit backhauls at $10K+. You also mention that it is not very secure, do you know of WPA2/RADIUS being broken? Ubiquiti products are being widely used in the wireless internet service industry for the reason that it is one of the best price/performance ratio products available, and that is why I use it as well. BTW, here's a link from a forum group of WISP's discussing use of Ubiquiti products... http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r24160793-Ubquiti-Rocket5-as-backhauls Overall, very good results. Very few of my customers are willing to spend multiples of up to ten times or more for the wireless equipment compared to the camera cost, that's a tough sell unless it's a governmental or similar entity. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have a customer base that would buy $30K BridgeWave backhaul radios from me, I'd be eating great steak a lot more often, but until that happens, I'll still be using a lot of Ubiquiti product.

You're not likely to find anything like that, because the image stabilization systems usually rely on feedback from the camera to control them. Anything like that would likely be extremely expensive, and complicated. Having said that, there are a number of cameras (Panasonic 502/504 series, and some others) that provide electronic image stabilization by cropping off a portion of the pixels around the edges of the image, and then locking on objects in the field of view, and "sliding" the cropped area around to provide the stabilized image. Works fairly well, in most cases.

I don't think shropna is calling BS on being able to produce a 10 MP camera, the technology and capabilities are there. What I think he's talking about is there being any significant advantage of a 10MP imager coupled to a standard C/CS mount lens, and with the additional limitation of pixels that small (1.67um on a 1/2.3" imager, if I'm looking at the right imager cut-sheet). On that one, I would tend to agree. Even on the 5MP cameras, with the very high quality Fujinon machine vision lenses, I can see limitations of the optical system in the image. We'll have to see if the 10MP camera really produces that much more usable detail in a given image, or just a larger image with no more really useful information.

The Axis PoE midspan is just a re-badged PowerDsine midspan, anyway, with some extra profit tacked on for Axis. I have had good luck with midspans from Phihong, too (Cisco re-badges Phihong for their midspans) Oddly enough, though, Arecont sent us a PowerDsine midspan to replace the Phihong PoE midspan in our demo kit we got during their channel partner training, and no one has been able to answer why they did it. Some wireless equipment and other items use power over the Ethernet cable that does not comply with 802.3af, they just inject 12 volts or so onto the unused pairs in the cable, but most cameras comply with the 802.3af 48 volt PoE standard.

I always try to run direct burial type cable, in PVC conduit. Here, at least, even properly installed conduit always seems to have some moisture in it. If you have a conduit in place, you have more options for later repairs and possible upgrades/additions (fiber, etc.), compared to having to dig again later.. Go a little larger, and throw in a extra pull string, too, if you want to be really nice. (how come it seems like no one ever does that for us, though?) Some of you have probably had the fun of trying to break out the poured in sealant in gas station conduit fittings to add cables, haven't you?

Matrox makes several videowall solutions that are designed to offload IP decoding from the CPU of the viewing system, allowing for higher resolution and framerates, as well as standard multi-monitor output cards, look here for an example http://www.matrox.com/graphics/en/products/display_wall/ Milestone uses the hardware decoding card from Matrox to allow up to 16 D1 streams at 30 FPS each to be displayed.

That's right, RAID10 is drives mirrored in RAID1, and then striped together in RAID0. You can also get higher throughput with RAID50 or 60, which stripes multiple RAID5 or 6 arrays in RAID0 between them, with less disks necessary than RAID10. Are you going to be using a separate RAID controller card, or are you trying to use the motherboard capabilities? The software RAID provided by motherboards is much more limited than a controller card would be.

The Ubiquiti/Senao/Engenius product can allow more channels, but only if the product you are trying to connect to has that same capability. The spec sheet I looked at for a Foscam product listed 802.11B/G capability, which likely means standard 20Mhz channel widths, 2.4 Ghz only, and the standard 14 (or so) channels available. The Ubiquiti (and other higher grade products) allow for frequency shifting, and also slicing the standard range of frequencies available into smaller slices(10 or 5Mhz), which allows for more channels, but less bandwidth per channel. This allows more AP's to coexist peacefully in the same area, and allowing the ability to work around interference more easily. The Ubiquiti 5Ghz wireless N product I have on my bench right now allows for up to 43 individual 5Mhz channels, with up to 26 Mbps theoretical throughput on each channel, on modulation scheme MCS13. The latest firmware also has a built in spectrum analyzer, to allow you to find interference free channels more easily. But, you will need the same type of product at each end to be able to take advantage of these capabilities. One other thing I noted on the Foscam specs is that it does not list actual RF output power, another thing to be suspicious of, as well as the fact that you will be limited by trying to get the camera in a position that has a useful line of sight for both the view, and the wireless link back to the AP. I would strongly suggest looking at quality IP cameras without wireless built in, and then link them to the AP with some of the better known components like Ubiquiti, or others. As far as the recording software, I would strongly recommend Exacq. Zoneminder works, but is difficult to use, as well as severely limiting your choices in IP cameras. **********Edit******* Just re-read your last message, and I saw that you planned to use different wireless gear to make the link to the headend. Better choice by far, but why use wireless cams, then? Take a look at offerings from Acti, Axis, Panasonic, and others, and search for information here, before making your final decisions.

RAID5/6 does suffer compared to the performance of RAID0/10, but can still meet your needs, without needing the larger amount of drives, and providing redundancy. I have our office server in RAID10, using four 1TB drives, and it's quite fast, and redundant... but you only get 1TB of storage space out of it. Here's a review of the Areca controller on a 8 drive array http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/3051/areca_arc_1680x_pcie_eight_channel_external_sata_sas_raid_controller/index.html , I found higher performance on my 32 drive array, so it does appear that the drive performance is summed somewhat, even in RAID5/6.

I've had good luck with the Areca RAID cards, the 1231ML will easily run 800+ Mbps throughput in RAID5 or 6. I have also used their SAS 1680IX card to run two external bays of sixteen 1.5TB drives in RAID6, and that benchmarked at 950+Mbps.

If you are still trying to finetune what you have, I would turn the framerate way down, 4-6 FPS is pretty good for most applications. Also, are you running MPEG4 or MJPEG? On flaky connections, MJPEG can often work better, even though it is a higher data rate, because each frame is not dependent on the previous frames getting through in order to be decoded/displayed. If you need different wireless gear to replace the built-in connectivity, I'd take a look at products from Ubiquiti, they have some pretty high performance "N" rate equipment that's very reasonable in cost.

The best choice for outdoor exposure would be to use direct burial type cable, the jacket on it will last longer outdoors than other cable types. My personal choice would be to use direct burial CAT5 cable for the video through baluns, and the PTZ control data, and a separate good outdoor rated cable for power (cheapest heavy gauge wire I've found is the stuff for outdoor low voltage lighting, holds up well outdoors, too).

There is not a certain relay type to use, that will depend on your application. For your setup, you would probably be looking for a relay with a 12VDC coil (so you can use the power for the receiver to also activate the coil in the additional relay) and N/O contacts rated for the voltage and amperage draw of your light setup. You may want to look for something more like an industrial timer so you can vary the time the lights are on with each activation of the receiver (keep in mind, too, that the transmitters will only retrigger after a few minutes of inactivity, not right away with each motion event, as far as I recall. If you are using a DVR with relay inputs and outputs, you might want to feed the receiver input into it, and then use the DVR output to trigger the larger relay, you may be able to set the relay activation time in the DVR, as well as having the motion sensor activation a logged/action event in the DVR (trigger alerts, E-mails, etc.)

You probably will want to pull a separate pair of wires for power (16 gauge, more likely 14 gauge), especially if it is an outdoor Spectra, specs for the outdoor model is 73VA, which is only 23 feet on 22 Gauge wire (what you'll have by doubling two 24 Gauge wires). The Pelco power supply has a 28 volt tap that will get you a little further, but not a whole lot. Take a look here for a wire gauge calculator from Pelco, indoor Spectra is 23VA, outdoor with heaters on is 73VA.... http://www.pelco.com/sites/global/en/sales-and-support/downloads-and-tools/tools/wire.page

You are very much on the right track about using IP, but make sure you use GOOD IP and wireless equipment. Cameras with built-in wireless tend to be steaming lumps of crap, as well as the fact that they are not usually able to be positioned with both line of sight for the view you need, and the wireless link, to work effectively. A better choice is to cluster groups of cameras that can easily hard-wire to individual switch locations, and then a wireless bridge from there to the headend. If you have phone connectivity/cabling between areas, you could look at using SDSL modem pairs to establish connectivity rather than using Ethernet repeaters with CAT5, you can get 100Mbps symmetrical to 1000 feet+ on CAT3 phone cable, and lower rates well beyond that, with good DSL-type extenders (I have a large apartment complex wired that way, through existing phone cabling between buildings, to a central DSLAM concentrator at the NVR) You could also look at using MOCA or HPNA converters to run over existing cable TV cable. For wireless AP/bridges, I've had good luck with Ubiquiti products, they are a popular product choice with a lot of wireless internet providers. Their wireless "N" rate product can provide a lot of throughput, while being able to use smaller bandwidth channels (5 or 10 MHz, as opposed to the traditional 20MHz channels) so you can have more channel selections for multiple links, or avoiding interference sources (the 5GHz band tends to be less polluted, as well as having more channels available).

If he wanted to use the Panasonic 484, you can fit a 15-50mm lens on it... http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ModelDetail?storeId=11201&catalogId=13051&itemId=97267&surfModel=PLZ15/33 Having said that, the multiple camera setup might be better, if you are not dealing with large lighting extremes (which the Panasonic excels at). Not a big fan of PTZ's, unless you are controlling it all the time (not likely), or calling presets with external sensors (fun approach, but you could probably still do multiple fixed cameras at less cost)... And PTZ's will not see around corners, which is usually the limit of useful viewing range, in a residential install.

Something like this should work.... http://www.grainger.com/Grainger/items/1N966?Pid=search it's stretchy, too, so if a backhoe or other equipment grabs it, you'll see it coming out of the hole. Like you mentioned, put it towards the top of the trench, so someone hits it before your cable.

I've gotten two years+ with them, as well. It was a fairly low use environment, so it wasn't transmitting too much. I have been using Lithium 9 Volt batteries in a few others (1.5 years, and counting, on those). I had ten+ of those setups (don't remember the exact count) in a high end residence quite a number of years back, to allow controlling a couple of Pelco Spectra's to preset positions, and create alerts, through a Pelco 6700 matrix and Genex multiplexer, and a Panasonic AG-RT600 recorder. Remote access was through POTS dial-up with a Prism Micro Mole 300 unit (I'm dating myself, aren't I! ). That was some serious hardware back then, and it was a fun install.