scorpion

Close your eyes and use the force sparks! Ha! Ha! Sorry!

Hello! I look forward to your post! With you time difference, I guess it will take a while to get back to each other! Take care! See you on the Forum.

You have to have them during the activity! DEFENSE attorney to the JURY. Ladies and gentlemen BEYOND ALL REASONABLE DOUBT!!! DO NOT CONVICT MY CLIENT!!!!!!

How rugged is the Aver media DVR that is fanless? I would be leary of a fanless DVR, but I have some applications where the DVRs must be installed in a master bedroom. Most people are bothered by the fan noise at night when they are trying to sleep, or the DVR is located in the hometheater area, and during quiet passages of the movie the fan sticks out like a sore thumb! I would appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

Hello everyone! I want to make a disclaimer about some of this. Some of these ideas came from different sources. I owned a sub sandwich restaurant, that I built from the ground up, and I built a nightclub that started as a teen club, and built it up. There have been some businesses that my friends have owned, and I have helped them as well. All of these ideas have come from one or multiples of the above. Some have been thought out but never been acted on. Some that I thought were dead on target failed in one time frame but it worked way above expectations in another. I have come up with the most stupid idea to take advantage of something that came up out of the spur of the moment and have it pay off so well that I was over whelmed! 1 On your advertisment put an extension number in the phone number. When I get a call and they ask for extension 69, I know what newspaper, thrifty nickel ad, road side "realestate" sign, flyer, door hanger, or business card taped to a gas pump. I know if it is the local paper, the out of town paper, or the home town wannabe newspaper. I know if it is my hometheater business card, CCTV card, or my nightclub/bar business card. Extension 32 yes one moment. Put them on hold. I have cheat sheets with the promos. Find # 32. Now pick up the customer and you see the ad that they see. It is funny how I get calls from a business card that I gave out 5 years ago! 2 You want to do radio on the CHEAP? Find a friend, or talk to a business that would have an interest in doing this. I go to the radio station and I get the time slots after 10pm. If I beg, I sometimes can get the spots for $20.00 each. I take the first 30 seconds, and my friend takes the second 30 seconds. This is a one minute commercial. We do 25 spots a week on the radio. We split the cost 50/50. It cost me $10 a spot X 25 = $250 a week! Yes this is a lot of money but it is dirt cheap if you get daytime quotes. Friday at drive time at 8am cost me $75 - $100 per spot! We rent a digital multitrack recorder from the local music instrument store. We make our own commercials. It is a lot of work! We leave blank spots in the ads so that we can taylor it to the season, or change it with a different voice. This commercial can be five years old but you do not recognize it. Sometimes I have the DJ from that radio station fill in the blank Over different stations they sound different. Some stations are hard rock, with the "stoner", some are top 40 geared to daytime women listeners, some are geared to 20's something or the 40's something. It is great when hollywood movie star is in the news and you can grab a premade commercial and fill it in with the "event" and get this on the air. It blows people away that someone famous does something, and I have a commercial on the air that day! 3 Buy or make some cookies. Ok,a lot of cookies! In advance go and have some stickers made up like a business card. It should be a round circle. Order at least a 1000. You get a better price break. It will probably cost somewhere around $200 to $300 depending on the size of the sticker. Wrap the cookies in "saran wrap"(yes tm for all of you lawyers out there!!), and put the sticker on the bottom to "seal" it. Place all of these cookies in a box. Now go to all of the High School Home Coming games in your area. Talk to the cheerleaders in advance as to what you want to do. You can bribe them in a way if you offer to take out an ad in what ever "newspaper" sponsors the cheerleaders. Go to the Home Bleachers. Divide the bleachers in to 3 sections. Start with the left side, then do the right side. When you get to the middle section they will have seen this done and it will be a mad house and they will be screaming the name of you company at the top of their lungs!!!! Would you like to know what I do? Here is what I do. Go to the left side and have the cheerleaders chant scorpion, scorpion, scorpion, and toss a cookie here and there. The crowd will look at you like you are smoking crack! Someone will figure out that if they chant scorpion that they will get the cookie that they would really like! Now you will have more people actually trying to chant. Toss somemore cookies! Now the section is really lively!!!! Wait till later in the game and do the right side. Again they will look at you like you are on crack. Now comes the sweet spot. When the center section sees you pick up the box with the cookies in them the whole bleachers start chanting in unison scorpion, scorpion, scorpion, scorpion!!!!!!!! Now start tossing those cookies everywhere!!!!! You can toss some chips too if you wanted. The place will go mad!!! I have stopped games where the players wanted to know what was going on!!! scorpion, scorpion, scorpion!!!! I cannot walk in the mall without group chanting scorpion, scorpion scorpion!! Ah MAN We thought you had some cookies!!!!! IT DOESN'T STOP THERE! Before the game a big box of programs will come in. I tell the head coach that I can get people to buy the programs like mad in the next year! HOW? Here is how. Take 2,3, or 4 programs, what ever you feel comfortable with. Have the coach hand write a message on one particular page. "Congradulations! You have just won a free security camera and you can pick it up at the concession stand! During part of the game the announcer will anounce "HEY EVERYBODY GRAB YOUR PROGRAM AND GO TO PAGE 11. IF YOU HAVE THE COACHES SIGNATURE YOU HAVE JUST WONE A FREE SECURITY CAMERA FROM SCORPION THEATERS!!!!!!! It is a blast to watch people "come on down" like it is the price is right or something while they shake their program over their head, and they scream all the way down!! I put sticker on the camera as well. When they get back to their seats everyone around them will ask if they can "see it"! I also put banners on the fence around the field, and I have "realestate signs" for people to see when they leave the game later. I usually bring a camcorder to the game and just walk up to randome people and ask them to say something. "We love scorpiontheater, and XXXXXX high rules"!!!!! I usually will go to some pizzera and show the video to who ever shows up at the gathering. Make sure they have a very large banquet hall! 4 Mothers day. I buy an obcene amount of daisys. They are very reasonable in price. I will usually go around to doctors office, lawyers etc. I give all of the ladies a flower for mothers day, and I leave a bowl of YES YOU GUESSED IT! CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES! I also drop off business cards as well. 5 Build a float for the Christmas, Thanksgiving, or the 4th of July Parade. Find a buddy who has a DJ business you can promote each other. He brings his lights, fog machines, speakers, and amps!! I love watching the night time parades and you can see the kids dancing to the music before you even get up to them! Pass out candy! Pass out YES CHOCOLATE COOKIES!!!!! 6 I have banners and realestate signs around all of the time. Once people were lining up in the street. There is no parade! What is going on. OH its the Olympic torch runner coming through! BAM I get the Banners up, get the signs out, and call the radio station who is marking the route of the runner and ask for a shout out from Scorpion Theater. There are usually a lot of people with radios and I get to hear my self. We have a lot of rocket launches and the tourist love to hear the count down and watch them take off. The launch area is about 40 miles do north of me! 7 Have a signage/printer shop make some really small stickers with the name of your company and give them to the kids of your customer. The customer will want to strangle you a week later but the kids will love you forever! 8 Have some banners made up. "CARWASH" sponsored by scorpiontheater. Have some hand held signs made up that say CARWASH. Get some buckets, sponges, hoses, towels, soap, and whatever. Maybe get some ot those orange cones at the hardware store. Talk to the local Burger King, McDonalds, Subway, area supervisor, or owner. Get some tickets made up with a BOGO. Buy one sub/burger get the second one free. The football team, cheerleaders, mathclub, rocket club, Glee club or who ever can sell these tickets in advance! They money off the carwash even if the ticket purchaser never shows up for the carwash! You get all of the exposure by helping out these groups! Now find a place that will help out with the groups that will let you have a carwash in the lot and let you use their water. Mix some groups. I tell the cheerleaders that I get can get the chess club to help wash the cars if they will help at their car wash. Believe me the chess club is really going to need a bunch of girls in bikinis if they expect to make any momey! I have some more ideas but I think I have bored you all enough. Remember if you do not like the idea thats ok. Do not do it. If you like it, feel free to modify the idea to suit your needs. Good Luck!!!! Let me know if anyone like these ideas.

Never worked with these style of systems. I have heard of PTZ that can move to a preset when the DVR detects motion on a camera. This gives you another angle to view the "scene". I thought most systems in this category used motion sensors, or beam detectors to activate presets. I would not know how to prioritize a scene so when you have multiple movements it selects the highest priority scene. Motion detection is not the end all of all systems. It is a sacrifice created to save space on hard drives. 24 hour recordings on an entry level system will eat a hard drive quickly as we all know, and piss off a customer who goes to retrieve this needed data, and they have found that it just got wrote over. NOW what do you do? Yes! In a high threat, or high security area you will want 24 hour recording but the design will be for large capacity storage. It is true that you will lose an event with motion detection for many reasons. Sometimes it may be that you have to tweak the sensitivity of the settings to get close to what you are trying to accomplish. I would much rather use several ways to catch the video. Beams, and detectors have their place, but what about where someone jumps a fence. Then you have to wait till they trip a target zone. What if something happens outside of a target zone? 24 hour will catch it, or you can use motion as a back up to other systems. I like how we all design the perfect system with all of the details worked right down to the finest detail with every failure thought out in advance only to find the customers never looks at the video, or even turns the thing on!

Actually I would put cameras in the warehouse. I would find a spot where I could mount a camera with a large size zoom. Being so far back away from the loading dock itself and being so high up, they may not even notice the camera. True, you cannot see in to the trailer, but can you get video of them carrying the stolen goods. What about placing a camera far away from the employees cars but using a zoom lens to see if they are putting the goods in to their personal car? If they park far out in a parking area, but it is close to a treeline what about one of those "hunting" style cameras strapped to a tree to catch their cars? You have got a tough one! I would "hire" a new employee and see if he can participate in the thefts. Maybe hire an off duty police officer to pose as a new employee?

I am sorry I cannot help you more. I am in to stand alone DVRs.

I hear you on this one kensplace! Just saw a job where we had to give away 220 feet of wire, conduit, labor to meet a botched sales job. The job again was botched so the sales guy promises the customer a free extra camera installed, and did not bother to relay this to the installation crew! Now the customer wants to move another camera from the side of the garage door to the middle of the garage door, and wants to change the lens to wide angle, and want to see the whole (very large) driveway at night. The customer wants to move the wireless camera out at the dock, and point it at his boat. This was supposed to catch a person walking down a dock, and not illuminate a 40 foot boat. A botched site survey equals a botched install! I think I will go buy some tums.

In the retail price, you pretty much have a wide open field! I would probably want to know, what is the setup that you are going to put this DVR in. What kind of cameras (not model numbers) are you putting in? Outdoor, indoor, indoor covert? Are you using bullets? Wide angle, 6mm, or varifocal? What is the customer watching? I know you are an expert and these questions are a nuisance, but I wanted to paint a picture so that I could see what you need. I would go ahead and get an Mpeg4 unit that will allow you to come in with IE. Even if the customer did not want this feature at least down the road when plans change they can "activate" this feature. I would def get the triplex features so that looking at past history I do not stop the camera recording. For your price listed I have good news! You should be able to get a 4 channel DVR. If you do not need the other three channels, I say get it anyways. This will allow for expansion, upgrade, or completly setting the CCTV system in a different way as needs change. Any thing else I need to know?

Hello Marzit! Welcome to the forum!

Hello Mekon! Welcome to the forum!

Welcome to the forum! I am in to stand alone DVRs. I am sorry I cannot help you out more. Glad to see another Floridian here on the forum!!!

Hello! I am glad to see another Floridian here on the forum!

How is your project coming along Maxima?

Hey Kmurray! How is it going? I look forward to having you on the forum!

So how did it go Texwolf?

Yes please! I would be interested!

Welcome to the forum! Congradulations on the expansion of your business! I hope it does you well! I to use the premade cables quite abit. Although lately I seam to have more, and more problems with them. For some reasons at the connector point they seam to have a bad connection. I have never had this problem before. I do not know if it is due to the recent spike in copper prices and they are trying to cut corners of if I have been getting the ones made on a monday morning, or a friday evening. The premades are great for quick attic work. Much easier than siamese. Although I have ripped to shreds some of the premades while trying to pull down a wall. Sometimes I hit a missed placed drywall screw. Nothing worse than having to recrawl through an attic, and rerun a wire. When I run siamese I watch real good to make sure I do not get part of the shield wrapped around the center conductor causing a short. When I bring up all of the cameras and one is not working I just run out to the camera cut off the connector crimp/compress a new one and that is usually the end of it. Once in a blue moon I will have all of my cameras flickering in and out, and just as I get everything working the video goes out again. I find this to be a bad batch of bnc connectors. The one prized tool that I have is a small battery operated lcd screen. I can check for power to the camera because I have video. If I have video off the camera then it is a video wire problem, or the connector at the DVR. If I have all of my camera videos at the DVR point prior to connecting to the DVR then this completes my installation. Coworkers laugh at me because I do a lot of checking as I go. After running wire through conduit for 200 feet I will throw on a power supply with an extension cord, and hook it up to a 13 monitor (great for outdoors). If I have video great! If not I can solve this before I run the wire in to the house. They stop laughing when we have a crash and burn, but we can solve it very fast because we can eliminate a lot of factors from pre testing. Then they are very grateful that I check this and that! Nothing worse than spending all day trying to get a system up and going when you just want to go home after a very very long day! I am really looking forward to July and August here in Florida!!! YA! Right!

Hey chime me in. We can give someone a seminar on CCTV and write this trip off! I like the sound of that! CCTV Guy, you are welcome to come wrestle some American crocs but they probably will seam tame compared to what you are used to!

If you want to use the wired covert cameras, ask if the connector is real small where it connects to the camera before you buy it. My distributor has the PIR/smoke that has a real small connector. I will take a guess at its size, but it is close to 16th of an inch deep, and 1/4 of an inch wide. I can poke a small hole in to the false ceiling tile and place the bnc/power cord to the camera through a very tiny hole, and then run it inside of the device and then plug it in to the board of the camera. When you go to dismount the device you have to go in reverse order. Open the device and remove the small "molex" style connector from the board, pull it out of the device, and then pull it through the ceiling tile. You can do the same in a house. You make have to "poke" a small wire through the ceiling where you are going to mount the camera. You will have to get up in the attic, and move the insullation, and find your "flag" wire. Pull this wire out and make the hole just big enought to get your connector through in to the building below. Connect your cables, and put the insullation back. On the inside of the house pull enough cable out of the ceiling to reach the device and connect to the board. After you have done this put a little caulk in the hole. If the cable is black and you need it to be white, just keep some white out (office store supply) in your tool box. You can paint the cable white to make it blend in better. I age my devices the best as I can. Wipe some dust off of something and smear the stuff on top of the motion PIR. I put my devices without the camera installed in to the sun to give it the yellow glow of age so that it is not pure white.

I agree with Securitymonster about the wireless. Most people buy the off the shelf wireless cameras and they do not realize that the transmitter may only be 100milli watts of power which is about the same as a childs walkie talkie. Nothing wrong with these as I do use them, but you have to use them in the right way. Just because the box says 300 feet line of site does not mean that you will get that distance. You will actually want the transmitter/camera and the receiver to be very close to get a real strong signal. AVOID USING THESE IN A CONVIENIENT STORE. ALL OF THOSE COMPRESSORS WILL DESTROY YOUR VIDEO. By default most of those cameras may be on 2.4 Ghz, which is an FCC license free frequency, which means everybody uses this freq to include cordless telephones, 802.11 A/B/G/N/X, and video extenders for t.v.s. You will actually want to use a different freq, and this has to be selected depending on the situation, and the design of the cctv system. Professional systems may use a one Watt system or higher for wireless, and you will need an FCC license to operate (non external antenna). Some professional setups, may require a HAM radio license. Do not get caught without a license, as it can get really ugly. If you have a lot of experience with wireless and you disagree with our posts that is fine because you have the experience to make the right decision. Wireless= Buyer beware!

PM me and I will let you know what dealer here in Florida I use for my coverts.

I use covert cameras quite abit. I have never had the client take a employee/customer to court so I cannot give advise in the legal matters. No matter how good the video is, it is how good the defense attorney is. I always keep this in my mind as I set up systems, it is the booming voice of a defense attorney, with his fist banging on the jury rail, BEYOND ALL REASONABLE DOUBT, LADIES, AND GENTLEMEN! Most of my coverts land in this kind of category: My husband just had a heart attack and he cannot run his company and his doctor wants him to stay at home and rest, but things have been happening at work..... My elderly father who is bed ridden has a nursing company that cares for him on a daily basis while I am at work, and I am so scared that they do not feed him, or give him his medicine. I found bruise on him the other day, and I think they dropped him on the floor. Please help me. We busted 10 employees from one company! The state has moved in on this company. I wish I could tell you all what we caught! Everything. From "bored" male nurses who decide to "entertain themselves by hand" so to speak, to pure negligence. Poor lady! Please help me I have a real problem! My office manager who I have trusted for 15 years has shut down my complete business, and she is stilling my business! I cannot use my phones, she has changed the 4 digit password, and has the phone being forwarded to a tracphone, and she is getting all of my sales calls. I cannot get my phone back because Bell South (now ATT) will not unlock them because I do not have the 4 digit password!!! I have to go down to the offices and show my business license, my drivers license, and I have to prove that I own the business! Somehow this lady is still getting back inside of my business! Help me! In the process of setting up cameras for remote view I found that she has the server set up to forward the url. You go to his website and then you end up at her website! He did not know this and I had to be the bearer of bad news. FOR CAMERAS: I mostly use the covert PIR ( or motion detector). I have 3 types to pick from cheap, middle, and expensive. The cheap one is a B/W, and the middle is a color, and the expensive is a low light model. The low light model works great in the enty office/lobby at night and the only light source is the EXIT sign that is lighted!!!! The video is great (considering)! I do not use the smoke detector too much because you only get the top of the heads of people, and the side view I only use in a "hallway" or such. The smoke detectors are great for looking straight down in to cash drawer! I also have a speaker w/ a camera. I use this in the drive thru at fast food restaurants to watch the cash drawer (new construction). I use a pager w/ a transmitter. Depending on the environment for the covert install, but sometimes I get lucky. I can pull a bunch of books "forward" or closer to the edge of the shelf, and I can toss the page on top of the books and let it get lost in the "clutter", and let the transmitter "fall" behind the books to hide. In the night club/bar scene I find that most of the places paint the ceilings black. With the false ceiling I can use the 1X1 inch mini camera. They are so small and in a dark club you cannot see these cameras! I like to scrape off dust from conduit or top of cabinets and sprinkle the "debris" on to my covert PIRs to give them an aged look. I will take my hand and smudge them till I get the right look. In some cases I have scuffed cameras, painted them with a primer, painted them with one color, and then painted them with a crackle coat, and then painted them white or another color and let the crackle paint layer crackle the top layer. It will look just like an old painted furniture or whatever from an antique, or thrift store. I use this on my bird houses, fake pump houses, dog houses and whatever for bullet cams when they need to be covert for outside use.

Is this a cut the lock/tab, open the door, and throw as much product in to a van as you can? Is this inside theft job? Is it even possible to put a camera in a "box" with a live tracking device? Will you have cameras on the trailer while it is parked or is this over the road theft?