WirelessEye

You might be able to get everything, including housing wholesale for under 20k. You can't beat the performance of that setup for the price. If you only need 200', you could save a ton of money by using a 20x-30x lens and then you could get a smaller housing, thus reducing your cost even more.

I would suggest a Toshiba IK-1000 and a Fujinon 60x Lens. Detection range would be around 2.75 miles at night. Identification would be around 2 miles. Cost would be around $20k, plus housing.

eeek 1.2Ghz? That sounds like videocomm garbage.

If it's the city, they shouldn't need a license for 4.9Ghz. As a city they should have access to that band.

150ft. is nothing for wireless. You could use almost anything...

The guy I talked to said with the Lens I ordered, I'd be good up to 100ft. no problem. I've also noticed that if the plate is either old or dirty, it is completely unreadable as well.

Metal buildings can cause problems, but if your cameras are DC powered, you can install a DC Noise blockers (the $10 deals usually used for car stereos) and that will fix all your problems with ground loop interference, as least it has for us. I don't know if they have anything like that for AC however.

I have had a REG camera up for about 6 months now. At first I was impressed, but the more I look at the video from it, the more I notice it misses a lot of plates. Could need to be moved closer to the road, but the whole reason I got it was because it was supposed to be able to read plates from the distance I mounted it at (90ft.) I'd say it's hit or miss.

We don't have to sandwich non-metallic objects on any of the pole installations we do.... but then again, we earth ground the poles and install noise filters. I suppose both get the same result...

Our sister company builds mobile towers for them. I've met of few of their guys, they are good people. ICX is geared more towards military applications however, pricing them out of almost all privatized budgets.

Altronix, I believe is the creme' de la creme' of CCTV power supplies.

This is slightly off topic woodyads, but I was wondering: Would describe your tower systems to be a "Unmanned, vandal-resistant, self-contained, tower-based, wireless, solar-powered surveillance unit and system"?

You might try here: http://www.unitedvisionsolutions.com/ go to products page. They are EXPENSIVE though. Figure on $10k+

Their literature on their website states they use 4 channels, at least for 300Mbps. The problem with NLOS and high frequencies is molecular vibrations of the objects you are passing microwave through. The higher the frequency, the higher "molecular excitement". Not even 900Mhz is truely NLOS if you read the "fine print". Even if you talk to AvaLan who does 900Mhz, they'll tell you 1 or 2 buildings and half your signal is toast. I do know a rep from Motorolla (who was trying to sell me Canopy garbage a while back). I'll get in touch with him this week and see what he has to say about this issue. As far as security goes, there is only so much you can do with Wireless. Especially with video transmission. The more packets you transmit, the easier it is to crack any kind of WEP. Mac's can be spoofed easily and unless you have other measures in place outside of these methods, your data is free for the taking. Even proprietary encryption can be broken.

I believe 5.4 is legal in the U.S., but it can be bumped by radar frequencies (if present) by law. In my experience, power is needed in rare occasions. Like I said before, we've got 30+ mile links with only 200mw of power at the radio. I see very little reason for a radio that has 10X the power, as you aren't going to go 10X as far-- Most of your signal lies in the antenna. For example, a group of kids recently broke the world record for Wifi with a 300mw radio. The distance? 125 Miles! Of course, they were using (2) 10'+ satellite dishes to do it, but it just goes to show you; 300mw is nothing; antenna, antenna, antenna. Also, cisco stuff until the last few years was garbage. They were so hell-bent on developing their own Wifi chipset, they didn't realize that Atheros was killing them on price/performance/everything. A few years ago, they abandoned their chipset and now use atheros, finally. Of course, this just puts them "on par" with everyone else now. The only difference now between them and everyone else is GUI, Atheros Driver Optimization, and of course with Cisco-- how can forget... Price. Power does to a point, increase reliability, but only in rare cases. The main time it becomes a factor is if your radio is "seeing" another radio in the area and you have to overpower their signal to get your link-- which of course puts the other guy up a creek. My main question is: what kind of distance are you looking at that will require 2watts of radio power? My guess is curvature of the earth issues would kick in way before you could even utilize 3/4 of the power rating. How can Orthogon be true NLOS? There is no such thing in 5Ghz, at least that I know of. Not because of the hardware you are using, but becuase it is a frequency limitation. Even using Multi-Polarized and Circular-Polarized antennae are not going to get you true NLOS, the frequency is just too high. Perhaps it somehow uses the 4 bonded channels to pickup in diversity? I just don't know about Motorolla these days. Next they will claim it runs off of "perpetual motion".