Jim Barrett

I have a client asking about this device & wondered if anybody here has ever used it. I've worked with other Aiphone products for years but never this video integrated stuff. Aiphone wants a pair of wires but are specific about their wire. Different insulation, solid, parallel conductors, no twist, 11p/F capacitance, unshielded,4 ohms/1000 ft., etc. They even go so far as to extend the two year warranty to three years if installed w/ their cable (Aiphone #871802). Anybody have any experience with this stuff one way or another? I'm tempted to just use 18/2 & see what happens. If I had to repull the wire it wouldn't be the most expensive lesson I ever learned. Whaddaya think?

Good Day Folks, A while back my computer (running XP) died an unusual death and I had to buy a new box with Windows 7 for an OS. Now my AVC-760 pictures do not fill the space provided in the viewer. This is true of both quad and single cam modes, live & playback. The image is tucked into the upper left corner of the viewer area and covers about 75% of the area it used to. I'm viewing with my browser via LAN Anybody seen this problem &/or have a solution? Thanks, JIm

Good Day Folks, The Nubix4ST/AVC760A call monitor output sequences the cameras. Is there a way to slave that monitor to a channel via the I/O port? As we know, the documentation is sometimes confusing and I thought that activating the alarm function for, say, chan 1 would cause the call monitor to start recording, sound the alert, and pull up the camera. If the device is already in record should it not sound the alert & call up the screen? I activated the alarm function via the DETECTION SETUP menu, got the alert but no break in the squencing. Am I confused? Am I missing something? I bet Scorpion could help! Anyone else? Also, I've made this DVR work in a standard wired network w/ Dydns via RoadRunner broadband. Any pitfalls using AT&T DSL? Do I remember somebody saying that unlike w/ my broadband modem which lets me go out & back in on the same connection DSL might not let me do that? Pretty hard to check your setup unless you had an assistant off site that could check the connection. Thoughts & advice are greatly appreciated.

Nope, not using motion detection. Sequencing appears not to be related to any other settings. It sequences, on it's own timing, all four channels, all the time. If an external alarm appears it pops up the alarmed channel briefly and then starts sequencing again. If the external alarm is constant or is reinitialized the channel pops up and then starts sequencing again. If you extend the alarm duration the alarm light on the front panel stays lit (up to 40 secs) but that has no effect on the length the alarmed channel stays displayed.

I can't find a way to change the sequence interval, only the alarm duration & the alarm duration seems to have no affect on the sequencing.

Yep, I guess they're right, sorta. The DVR goes into alarm, the sequence pops over to the alarmed channel and then starts to sequence again. Reinitializing the alarm brings it back to the alarmed channel but then the sequencing picks up where it left off. The duration of the alarm setting appears to have no effect on the length of time the alarmed channel picture is held. Oh well, if that's the way it works, that's the way it works. Better to know than to not know. Thanks for the input.

Good Day to everyone. Several weeks ago I had a few requests for lower end DVR applications and I had no equipment I felt comfortable recommending. Since I had been following your discussions, I PMd Scorpion & asked him some questions which he quite graciously answered and steered me to a distributor who has turned out to be what I needed. I recently bought a Nubix 4ST (Scorpion, can you tell us what AV model that equates to?) on spec & have just set it up. The machine, when operating as required is sweet. It does what I want it to do & for it's price it does it quite commendably. Documentation Sucks. Out loud. Now that I've figured out how to use the device I will have to create real instruction sheets so that the people I sell it to can operate it. It is not intuitive. It would also appear that that there are things that can only be done in the supplied application, not at the front panel and not via IE. To the best of my knowledge you can not set the device into HDD overwrite at the front panel & you had better know where that control is in the app. I did forum searches on internet set-up & found some of Scorpions past posts & resources & found pertinent information. That said, no one was more surprised than me when I finally made it work via internet. But that seems the norm for all of these things. I've probably installed a couple of dozen DVRs now with internet access and was wondering if the rest of you find it a puzzling as I do. First off, i've done IDviews, ATV, Pelco, Speco & an endless variety of no-names and when coupled with an equally endless assortment of routers and cable/DSL modems and their individual quirks, no job ever seems straight forward. This seems to be the epitome of plug & pray. And it all seems to center around the dyndns & the contortions inherent therein. Has anybody ever developed a checklist type form to try and minimize these problems? I find that simply keeping track of all the IP addresses and where they go and keeping track of what I already tried that didn't work involves that high-tech combination of yellow pad and pencil. Oh well, if it was easy anybody could do it. Anyway, thanks Scorpion, I appreciate your willingness to lend your expertise to this forum & am sure others do also. Joey at Eclipse thinks highly of you. It seems he tries to do his best for his customers. Jim

Very strange. Did it ever work right or is this a problem that developed some time after install? I have seen DVRs do wierd things and have usually traced it to a power or ground problem. Is the problem consistent enough that you can reproduce it or predict when it will happen? I guess I would first make sure I have a good clean AC connection with ground (the last flakey DVR I had was trying to run on 104-105V AC, corrected the AC & the problem went away). Then I'd connect a camera on a short piece of cable and powered by the same ckt as the DVR. Be sure you have good connectors & cables. If the problem shows up you have everything right there for substitution/elimination. If you can, pull all the cameras & DVR to your bench & test them there. If the problem shows up you have the equipment right in front of you. If the problem doesn't show up your problem is in the install. If you bench tested the equipment before install & the problem didn't show, that's a clue. Strict and rigid troubleshooting techniques are required, otherwise you're counting on luck to find your problem. No matter what you're trying to fix the routine is always the same - Sectionalize, Localize, Isolate. Good luck. If it was easy, anyone could do it.

I dunno, I've used that camera a lot & that's a SPECO cable. Don't know that I've ever seen it anywhere else. Call SPECO & I suspect they'll send/sell you a couple. I'm not familair w/ the KT&C. The SPECO cable will adapt that camera connector to a video BNC connector and a 12v dc connector, both industry-standard. Not sure about the KT&C. Good Luck.

The device charges & programs via USB. Memory is SDHC card but there is some sort of DVR dock that has USB connections. That's the one I don't have. I believe it provides video out & USB in for both charging & file transfer but I'm not sure. archos.com should tell you what you need to know. Look under acessories. Good Luck

Right, I have the ARCHOS 405 and something called a travel adapter (or something like that, to provide the NTSC input. It seems that in the U.K. they had a 30GB version but all I ever saw here in the U.S. was a 2GB version. However, they take up to a 16GB SDHC card. I'm not sure but I think the Archos was about $125 & the adapter was under $50. They make another adapter that appears to allow output conections to standard video. I haven't looked at it very closely yet. The battery life isn't the greatest but what can you expect in such a small package? Works for me. I've never seen one of these in a store & wouldn't have known about it without running across it on the net.

Dremel tool, & I won't buy a knock off & I won't buy a cordless one. I also have a die grinder which, against mfg recommendations, I use for cutting (bolts, rod, wiremold,). Reciprocating saw (as an electrician you've probably got a sawzall or something but a good cordless reciprocating saw is quite handy). Small roll of stiff galvanized wire for making probes & fishes. Good luck, it's a tough way to make a living but running your own business is the most fun you can have while vertical. If it ain't, you're in the wrong place

Another thought is that some places seem not to require front plates and in places that do, (here in Wisconsin, for example) enforcement is very selective. Might be easier to try and catch the back plate.

Yep, the little buggers work pretty good for the purpose and the fact that you can play a DVD on it is just icing. However, not all portable DVD players have an in/out switch. The ones we're talking about obviously do. The problem I've had is the picture being washed out by the sun. So I find myself improvising sun shades and and/or trying to pick a time of day when the camera is in the shade. To that end I picked up a device called an ARCHOS portable video player. With its adapter and 3" screen you can plug into the camera whilst up on the ladder and do your adjustments. Smaller screen but easier to handle, it has pretty good backlighting, and when you're done you can record a few frames and save them for your records. The icing on this cake is that it stores and accesses manuals. I can usually download the manuals for the equipment I work with regularly &/or specific to a job to my ARCHOS & have them instantly available in PDF. I have a ton of manuals on an 8GB sdhc card. (When I worked commercial 2-way radio we carried hundreds of pounds of manuals that could now reduced to a few gigabites (well, maybe more than a few). Neat little device that I originally bought so I could watch Rocky & Bullwinkle while on the cardio machines at the gym. I love multitasking machines, probably because I'm a monotasker.

I checked Scorpions link and was surprised by how well the demo handled the headlights. It would be interesting to see if an angled shot copes as well.

Interesting problem. Sounds like one I'm likely to have and I'm racking my brain, now that it's been brought up, and can't see a solution. Older installations often ran double coax for reasons of their own but I'm seeing that less and less. Having said that, if anybody can figure it out it'll be Scorpion. I got faith in ya man.

Yeah, neat stuff. Only problem is now every body will think that the $100 camera will give them the ability to read a bar code at fifty paces People got no idea that there are different levels of performance & that it's dependent on price-duh! I'm in the process of collecting clips from different level cams as I come across them. I'll load them on my Archos & show people what a $100 camera looks like vs what a $300 cam looks like.

Good advice crirvine. As a professional I always prefer it when the DYIer goes ahead, buys the low end equipment & when they find they have images that are poor to unuseable they give me a call. At that point I know that they want good coverage and all the preliminaries are out of the way. kraemer94, if this is a hobby-type thing knock yourself out & have a good time. If this is a protect your home and family type thing, go find a professional. You pay a plumber to plumb, and an electrician to electrify. You should think about paying comm techs to comm.

Please post video. Do I understand that you tested these w/ the extension cables before you installed them & that they worked? I kinda suspect these are the Swann cameras that we would call "low end"? Problem only occurs at night?

A variety of places also sell the pyramids that convert IR to RF & back again. I've used the Xantec stuff & it's really neat but these pyramids (I've seen them at Radio Shack) are prettty cheap.

I have a portable DVD/CD player (pretty cheap) w/ a 7" screen. It has a video in/out switch that allows me to pump video into it and see it on the screen. It's only drawback is that the screen is not backlit so in sunlight I have to shade it to keep the picture from washing out. I have also just gotten an Archos (much smaller & backlit) but haven't tried it out yet for that purpose. I bought the archos for those interminable sessions in the gym & then found out it had a lot of potential.

Any body got any clues? Small bullet cam that started this after about 4 months in service

Aha! Sounds like someone qualified to have an opinion. Looks like it's a GS5002CB. What do you think? Can't make it fail now. Seems to work good.

Use DC, end of problem.

I think it's a Golden State small tube cam.