Jburn

RG59U Siamese cable can go much further than 300 ft.

Hi, guys, I'm Jay. New to the Fo. My company installs marine electronics onboard large offshore vessels. Recently, they have been asking for more and more cameras installed down in the engine room. The problem with this is the amount of electromagnetic interference in the engine room, and interference in general. The cameras I am using are HD-TVI 1080p cameras. Instead of pulling siamese RG59U, we have been pulling shielded Cat5E and using video and power baluns. The camera wires run in wireways that are just packed with all kinds of other wires. There are high voltage power wires, signal cables, two large generators, thrusters. I'm afraid the shielding on the Cat5 is insufficient. When both generators are running and the thrusters are running, I get massive interference on every camera in the engine room. Green tint, rolling horizontal lines, black outs, it's bad. We even went as far as to pull power from a 12v source close to the cameras, just to make sure voltage drop wasn't the problem (camera runs are 250 ft), no change. I can link photos and video of the interference if anyone wants to see it. The boat that just left keeps having these issues, and they are not going to leave me alone until the issue is fixed. I have been reading about quad shielded RG6, could this be the solution to my problems? I am planning on testing the cameras with a test monitor to eliminate the cabling as a problem, and bringing some cameras from a different distributor to see if the interference is getting in through the cameras instead of the cabling. Pretty sure the issue is the lightly shielded Cat5 crossing over so many cables, though. Too long didn't read, will quad shielded RG6 block most of this interference?

You can with the proper baluns. Some allow up to like 1200 ft.

Hilarious.

Thank you for your quick response. So IP cameras aren't bothered by interference? That's good to know. I am trying to switch our camera systems over to IP for simplicity and ease of installation, but I was worried about the interference part. As far as the cable being ran close to high voltage cables, we have no choice. The shipyard provides wireways for out cables, cable trays is what they are. But it's community space. That means that the DP guys run their cable in there, the Caterpillar guys run their cable through there, the thruster power, thruster controls, generator signal and controls.. It's a mess. We try to keep ours to one side, but we end up crossing over these other cables a lot. Oh, they can be bothered, it's just that they're a bit more immune and the signal is typically go/no go. Like I said, the only thing that would be completely immune is optical fiber. But isn't HD-TVI digital? Wouldn't that qualify for less interference? Every camera on the vessel looks fantastic, even these three. But when the generators and thrusters are turned on, these three specific cameras go crazy.

Thank you for your quick response. So IP cameras aren't bothered by interference? That's good to know. I am trying to switch our camera systems over to IP for simplicity and ease of installation, but I was worried about the interference part. As far as the cable being ran close to high voltage cables, we have no choice. The shipyard provides wireways for out cables, cable trays is what they are. But it's community space. That means that the DP guys run their cable in there, the Caterpillar guys run their cable through there, the thruster power, thruster controls, generator signal and controls.. It's a mess. We try to keep ours to one side, but we end up crossing over these other cables a lot.

Forgot to mention, the HVR (hybrid video recorder) for the HD-TVI cameras is rather large. It has internal components that convert the analog signal to digital, that's how you get 1080p over analog cabling. The NVR for the IP cameras will probably be smaller. If the recorder size matters.

We use both, you will get the same resolution out of HD-TVI that you will with IP. The only difference really is the ability to do away with a power supply with the IP cameras if the NVR has a POE switch. Cat5 and Siamese RG59U are pretty much the same cost, and the cameras run the same, so the two systems costing around the same is not really a big surprise. The extra cost of the NVR is probably offsetting the cost of the power supply. Keep in mind that the installer needs to mount water-tight junction boxes near each camera to terminate the connections into, electrical tape is not sufficient to keep water out.