Kiwi

Personally I doubt there is a problem with a foot or so close proximity of coax to lighting-level power AC, but I'm sure these guys have a lot more field experience than I do! I used baluns and cat5e cable for one camera in my home installation as the cable needs to run 1" away from an incoming 240 v line over 8 ft. I was quite surprised to see no visible evidence of interference with a monochrome camera. Just another opinion...

I have a fairly-new Avtech 782 deployed overseas. This is a 4-ch unit with CD burner. I can't view it with Firefox on a PC but it works with FF in Linux. I have no idea why - it should work on both using Java. As mentioned, you really need to use the Video Server E Windows-only app for all the options. The one item missing however is time scheduling of motion recording - you have to do it using the on-screen menus - no fun in my case at 1 fps over a 128 kbs connection. Some clever person needs to analyze the communication and write a unix app. If you look on Avtech's FTP site there are some other apps littered around but I don't see anything for Mac or unix. ftp://211.22.74.18/

I've purchased an Arecont 3130 with 4mm lenses for a home application. I'm still reviewing suitable software - convenient viewing of archives seems to be a weak area. For 3 sides you will likely need three cameras which will use up most of your budget. A weatherproof housing will also be a problem even thought the Arecont is quite small. The 4mm lenses give almost 90 degrees of view and the 3130 is quite sensitive in low light. I think 10 ft off the ground is a bit high to get usable views. Perhaps house them in steel electrical enclosures with windows on the walls at a lower level?

Hmm, I've recently purchased a 3130 and am looking at the various ways I could deploy it. I'm no expert by any means but as far as I can see it's passive in the sense that an intermediate program needs to request the data from the camera and issue it to the NAS. The camera cannot be programmed to do this on its own. I've configured WebcamXP for example to accept streaming frames off the camera and upload images over FTP at a set interval. If you need the manual, just shout. Let us know how you resolve this.