SEANHAWG

Got a customer who hooked up 8 cameras to a single 24VAC 20VA transformer wall wart. He was wondering why the heck the transformer failed and wanted me to replace it. I never really understood the "VA" thing but I know that powering 8 cameras off of one of those things cant be good. We market them as single camera power supplies to avoid this problem.

I got to thinking about this today and I am not even sure if you are still reading this or not, but why dont you just ask your gun club if you can run some underground cat 5 to the target. And while your at it, why not have an electrician run some power out there as well so you can hook up a power supply to the camera and power an active balun to send video transmission back to the monitor. Have all the gun club members pitch in and everyone will be happy. The weather protected camera could be somewhere on the ground right below the target zoomed right in on it, and of course you would have to have the camera shielded with some kind of metal object that could deflect bullets for those wild shots.

I assume there is a way if I knew what the pins on the bottom were assigned to. Who thought of the idea of the backbox anyways?

Yeah I could but I have the chance to buy alot of these and they will all come without back boxes.

I was considering doing that but I hear when you do that you will have problems with port forwarding which I will need to hook up my DVR and IP camera. Also, I have heard that it reduces the speed a little bit too, but that part is heresay.

I just got it installed yesterday and I must say it is blazingly fast. I got the 24 Mbps service. I havent experienced speeds over 3 mbps so this speed is pretty new for me and I like it. One thing that the kid did that installed the wireless modem is that he put it in the worst possible location in the house that he could have. We have a small bonus room upstairs that is far away from all of our computers and other devices. My wife was home and didnt think that this was a problem, the problem is that the wireless signal is not that strong and it results in 7-12 mbps whenever we are in the living room. So we are having another installer come back and "do it right" tomorrow and put the modem in our living room.

Are you sure the Lorex died and not the hard-drive inside. Its pretty rare for an actual DVR to die, but its pretty common for a hard-drive to go out. If you decide to get another hard-drive, get a Seagate SV series.

The only advantage that CIF would have would be that it may be at a faster frame rate but it just depends on your DVR, some can record at D1 at 30 FPS. Otherwise, if its the same frame rate, D1 is always better and there would be no advantage at all.

I sent you a PM, we might be able to help you if you dont mind buying used.

I think he means ratio of operators to cameras. Assuming that he means there is going to be a person who's job is to just monitor the cameras. Which is really an open ended answer. If you have a dude who just looks at cameras all day, then I am sure he could handle 32 cameras if its just for theft puposes. It just really depends on alot of factors. How high risk is the area, what are you monitoring and for what reason, is the sole job of the monitoring person just to look at the cameras, etc.

That looks like a pretty cool camera, Ive never seen them before but the specs look pretty cool. But aside from that, I guess I am still confused on why you would need to run 120 VAC to the cameras at all. It would seem much simpler to run 18/2 wire to the cameras and just power it with a 24 VAC power supply as Soundy said. You could always use a 28 VAC power supply if you are concerned about that long power run, but I have ran longer runs than 225' with a regular 24 VAC power supply that have powered a heater or fan and a camera simultaneously without any problems.

sweet

Great idea, I was thinking of doing something similar in my house. But What I really want to do is be able to bring my DVR's mouse with me in any room of the house because I really like controlling my DVR with my mouse, especially the PTZ. I know they make pretty long range wireless mice but those usually arent plug and play and you have to have a windows operating system. Does anyone know how to overcome this?

I guess steroids are legal in the netherlands.

Thats a very common problem when controlling your PTZ over the internet. The problem becomes greater when you have a slow internet connection from one of the locations.

just to furthur clarify, what I meant by Analog cameras, I meant "Non-IP" cameras. The word digital gets used loosely, Analog cameras can be digital cameras.

Try a lower Baud Rate too if that doesnt work. I bought a cheap Mini Controller a while back and I couldnt get it to work on anything but 2400 Baud

Well I wouldnt necessarily say Analog cameras are "unusable video", but megapixel cams will get Lombana what he was looking for in HD. He'll just need to reach into his pocket a little deeper this time.

Or save yourself some money and eliminate the problem by re-positioning the camera if possible.

If you want HD quality, then you will need to get Mega Pixel IP cameras, which are a different animal than your Defender system. You wont get anything HD (720p or 1080p) With Analog equipment. Sams does not have any IP equipment that I know of and I am sure they definetely do not have Mega Pixel security camera. If you want 4 megapixel cameras than be prepared to spend 5 to 10 times what you spent on the defender system. If you are on a budget, then consider just upgrading your cameras that you Defender system came with. Check your DVR manual to see if it records in D1 resolution, if not, then ditch it as well and get another DVR. The main problem lies within the cameras that came with the defender system, more than likely that is the weak point in your whole system. The Toshiba that you mentioned looks decent but it has a fixed lens, which only works under certain circumstances. I would recommend getting cameras with vari-focal lenses which provides you more flexibility. Also I will point out that the Toshiba is not "HD", it has 480 TV lines. Thats not bad but its not what you would consider HD.

I am surprised that being the majority owner of Microsoft that you would not know how to do this. No but seriously, yes its possible but the auto-tracking PTZ's are expensive as heck and although I have never worked with one, I just expect that there will be too many false alarms with it where it really wouldn't be worth its money. Dont know if you are on a budget or not but you would save some money without the auto-tracking PTZ's. Or, it would also be cheaper to get a few wide angled mega pixel cameras that you can digitally zoom in on later.

I only have one right now but I am working on a deal of getting a whole Gaylord full, not sure if I am going to get it or not. I will have some that will be hidden within clocks and stuff, its pretty cool.

Dang, not bad. I cant find a wireless Analog cam that works decent under 20' with no walls in between. I always get interference, the picture will look great for 5 seconds at a time and then it just gets this wierd interference. I just bought one of those cheap Pan/Tilt IP cameras and I have to say it is actually pretty cool, it works off my routers Wi-Fi connection and it really gives a clear D1 picture for a wireless cam with little interference at all. The only thing is that it handles light differences very horribly, no customizable settings, but I wasnt expecting much out of it really.

Well, I was in the process of today of installing my second PTZ for my home system. I couldnt quite get the wire and cable through the hole opening that my first PTZ cable went through so I thought I would make the genius decision to get my drill and widen the hole a little bit more. I thought to myself, "well, If I'm careful I should be able to avoid drilling into the side of the existing cable" Well guess what I did....Yep, I ripped the existing cable to shreds Yeah I know it was a dumb arse move. what turned into a small project turned into a blood boiling drawn out ordeal. What I did was cut off the ripped part of the cable and install BNC's on each exposed end, luckily I had enough extra cable length to work with. Of course, I didnt have any couplers so I had to drive my butt up to my warehouse and get some couplers. Well sure enough, as soon as I installed the coupler, I still have no video, which ticked me off even more. So I re-connected my BNC's about 3 times each and still no video. What the heck? So I expose the coax's center conductor on each cable end and touch them together and ask my wife to see if she see's any flicker on the screen, and she sees nothing (I am not sure if this would do anything anyways but I figure I would see atleast a flicker but nothing) So this is where I stand. Did I screw something up on the camera when I shredded the cable and wire? Surely not. It was only the communication wire and coax that got shredded, the power wires were at a different location and the PTZ still powers on fine. I guess I'll jack around with it more tomorrow but I really dont know what else to do except to run a whole new dang cable run which is the last thing I want to do. This is why when people ask me if I install, I always say "No"

I ordered it and got the fastest one. Turbo Max Pro which is 24 MBPS @ $65/mo. They should install next tuesday. Sure beats paying Hughest net for 1MBPS for $70 a month. And I dont even get 1MBPS, more like a third of that. Why? or what would not make it work?