dmiller9

From an article entitled "Protecting Electrical Devices from Lightning Transients" in Electrical Engineering Times, an 18 AWG (lamp cord) wire will conduct approaching 60,000 amps without melting. However, we usually use 12 AWG or larger to conduct lightning harmlessly to earth on signal wires. 6 AWG or larger for AC electric. I would never use a 12AWG to connect a lightning rod to ground. I have seen some lightning rods with upto a 4/0 copper conductor to a ground grid consisting of 4 10' ground rods. You might use a 12AWG to bond a telephone line to ground but where I am from you can't even do that anymore as you require a #6 as a minimum. You are correct to say that lightning takes the path of least resistance; however, the path of least resistance is the highest point as air is one of the best insulators out there.

It the fence post is the highest object around for some distance then you need to ad lightning rods however I highly doubt it is. The lightning rods would have to be bonded with a #6 coper conductor to a ground rod at the base of the post. You probably don't want to hear this but I would forget about using the fiber converters all together and run Cat5e Underground shielded or some Industrial Cat5E shielded and properly ground the shield at the house to ground. You will prevent any unwanted ESD protecting to the switch and camera. You have a better chance of winning the lotto then getting a lightning strike hit to your camera on you fence. If you are really worried about lightning strikes then you need lightning rods. A 16AWG will do nothing for a lightning strike. The wire will burn up and the current will have no where to go but through other equipment rather then to ground. For correct lightning protection you need lightning rods grounded with a #6 to ground. The purpose of the lightning rods to to prevent the strike from ever getter to the equipment. Any previsions you take at the equipment for lightning strikes will never be enough.

In regards to lightning strikes unless your cameras are mounted on an extremely high fence I wouldn't worry about it. If you fence is chain link you could bond the fence to a ground rod at some point along the fence. The same goes for poles which have cameras on them. As for induced interference into buried Category cable due to lightning strikes into the earth a shielded Category cable is more then sufficient. Properly installed you should have no problems. Fiber is the best communication cable for rejecting noise since it is an insulator it can not conduct electricity. I would take the fiber right to your network switch and use a short patch cable between your media converters and your switch. How are you going to connect the fiber converter at the camera side? You can always put in some inline surge suppression as there is no need to install fiber. I am sure some people might disagree with me on this. The biggest thing I have found is during lightning strikes induced ESD can cause an unstable network connection. http://www.tripplite.com/en/products/model.cfm?txtModelID=151 Lighting is going to hit the highest point. It will hit the roof of the building first before it hits the camera under the eaves. What size is the ground? What is the ground connected to on the camera side? All grounds for lightning protection should be a minimum of #6.

This is the comment from exacq on twitter. "Updated search page, client login, dewarping, more." I am registered in there webinar about 4.7 and will let everyone know what I find out.

I have a eVista 16Channel DVR card that has been sitting collecting dust. It was purchased to demo and was only used in the shop for a short time. It is compatible with Blue Iris using a generic driver. The card supports 16 Channels at 120FPS. Model number is EV-500 http://www.weihai.com.tw/ Asking $200 (Paid over $400 new) Payment can be made by paypal and the items can be shipped out Canada Post/USPS. Receipt can be provided however Canadian residents must pay GST.

Reduced Price to $150

I am selling two Geovision IP Cameras for 20% below my cost. Both units were purchased as demos and have never been installed. 1 x Geovision FE110 1.3MP Fisheye Camera - $240 1 x Geovision FE420 4MP Fisheye Camera - $400 Payment can be made by paypal and the items can be shipped out Canada Post/USPS. Receipt can be provided however Canadian residents must pay GST.

What you need is a camera with good Wide Dynamic Range (WDR). When you get the natural sunlight coming into a room through glass the range of bright to dark become to great for most cameras to capture therefore you get over exposure and under exposure in certain areas of your image. A camera with WDR can compensate for this. I would recomend a Sony Ipela with view-DR (Sonys own WDR) or a Panasonic with WDR. Not all cameras with WDR are equal though. Check out the following image as all of these cameras are marketed as WDR and as you can see some preform better then others.

The mobotix and aercont 360 cameras are completely different designs from eachother. The aercont uses 4 idividule sensors with 45 degree lenses to give a 180 degree view as the mobotix uses a single sensor with a 180 degree lens. Both have there advantages and disadvantages Mobotix *Single stream *Easy setup *VMS has to support dewarping inorder to make image usable for viewing Arecont *Multiple streams (Sometimes VMS requires multiple licenses) *Larger Megapixel count due to multiple sensors) *Harder to setup dude to each sensor needs to be adjusted *No dewarping required *Large in size due to multiple sensors The arecont is not my favorite camera. I find there cameras to be very basic with very basic settings. The cameras do not offer any on board storage or digital inputs of outputs. They can also be very hard to focus. If you are looking for a decent 360 camera Vivotek has a new 360 3MP camera coming to market right away. The other option is you can use any box camera with an ImmerVision Lens.

Not sure there reasoning behind that but from experience I find anything above a 2MP has issues dealing with low lighting issues. So that might be there reason for not making anything higher then 2MP cameras. I will ask that question to David a Vivotek and see if he will respond. --Duncan

We have been testing the unit in our shop for the past couple weeks. The unit has excellent color accuracy and WDR. Like its predecessor the unit is extremely easy to install and setup. The onboard software is feature rich supporting 4 independent video streams, edge recording and much more. Being a Supreme series camera it uses a new faster CPU that will support the SVC codec in the future. For the price I don't think you can find a better camera with the features the Vivotek IP8362 has.

I will also pay the shipping charges within North America.

I should also mention this card has its own DVR Software with it and is quite decent.

The Avigilon IP Encoder uses JPEG2000 and only JPEG2000 so if your planning to use it with a different VMS you are out of luck. I would assume because of this the resale value on it will be quite low.

I can live with the larger file size of JPEG2000 if it can lower my WAN bandwidth using bandwidth management as implemented by avigilon. Any other companies doing this? I was really impressed with this feature in avigilon.

Areconts compact camera camera is practically the same as the other arecont cameras. What Arecont has done is put all the electronics onto a single PCB allowing the camera to be packaged in a much smaller form factor. This has allowed for lower cost of manufacturing and almost a $300MSRP price difference between its larger brother. The compact does however not have the option for a DC Auto Iris lens.

What i am looking for is some software that supports remote playback of recorded video from a camera to an Iphone, Ipad or android type device. Most of the software out there supports live viewing but not the playback of recorded images.

I will have to check it out. Sounds like what I am looking for. Anyone else have any other suggestions?

What NVR manufactures have an app that supports remote playback?

One of my customers has aprox 60 DVR through the city. Most of the DVR's are Panasonic and American Dynamics. He has ran into issues where the dvr has crash or no longer running for some reason and the only time anyone notices is when they go to pull video from an incident. Is there any 3rd party software that can ping or poll the DVR's to make sure they are up and responding and if they aren't send an alarm or via email or dry contact? Thanks in advance.

I am located in Edmonton, Alberta. The panasonic DVR's are embedded Linux OS and the American Dynamics are XP units. It would be nice if they are were all the same manufacture with its own central monitoring software.

First off what kind of cameras are you going to be mounting on the outside of your building? Dome Cameras, bullet cameras or box Cameras?

Please put me in the Integrators group. Thanks.

I would contact Panasonic to see if that controller is compatible with the WJ-HD316 or WJ-HD616 DVR. I have a feeling that you might be forced to upgrade your controller to the wv-cu650.

I have a CP Cam DVR model CPD507. Every time the unit is restarted its time and date changes back to the default. Has anyone ever had to change the internal battery on one of these units? What voltage of battery does it take?