System design/selection advice

[Farmhog 0]

Hi all this is the first time I have posted on this forum. I’m a 33 year old engineer from the UK and the son of a dairy/arable farmer. We have lots of problems with people coming onto the farm in the middle of the night and as such I have installed a CCTV system on part of the farm with great success but I need some advice before expanding and spending more money.

Current system – Ok, the farm is split into two sites which are 310meters apart and my father’s house is in about the same distance from both sites at 190meters away. We have installed fibre optic cable from his house to the first site where I have a POE switch with cat5 cable running to 6 cameras. The dedicated NVR sits in his house and we are able to view via software client, locally and remotely. The current NVR is an Xvison XRN1609 with 6TB storage, purchased from www.hdcctv.co.uk – also shown on www.y3k.com. The cameras are Xvisons XC1080BAP which have alarm inputs/outputs, audio in/out and are varifocal.

So I have been playing with this system for the last 6 months, on and off. The main reason we got these is to record things in the night and I initially relied on the camera motion detection which quickly became apparent that it wasn’t going to be reliable enough. So I then installed a PIR and had the output feed into the back of one of the cameras which then set the rest to record. This is very reliable and has caught people entering the farm at night. So essentially it works – I get over 2 months recording at 1080p, it records reliably on motion detection, it will email me on a trigger and I can view live and recorded video via the Goolink app. However I now want to rig up the other site and have found that hdcctv.co.uk/Xvision have changed their NVR lineup. I have been told they are just as good and now offer 4k recording and a few extra functions. This NVR will use different client software which I was hoping to keep the same so if it’s going to change, this allows me to explore the market for improvements and possibly get a different system etc – so I would REALLY appreciate some advice from some experts – for the money am I going get much better than what I have got or what Xvision offer.

Are there better NVR’s and cameras that I could get for the money that do what I want it to do – I need reliable motion detection via a remote PIR and really good night capture. Trying to identify people at night is a struggle as is number plate recognition. Is there a camera out there that can take much higher res images at a much lower frame rate – 1 pic per second. Or will adding security lights help to sort this out?

Sorry for the long post. I hope that there is some of you that can offer some helpful advice – thankyou in advance.

[Farmhog 0]

Anyone? Is there maybe a different section or forum I should be posting in? Thanks

[ssnapier 0]

Lighting is always the best option for improving image quality when identification is the primary consideration and it should help to reduce false alarms too. There are a ton of cameras on the market that will do what you are asking for, but if you are happy with the brand you have then keep rolling with it. If you choose proper lenses then I would not worry about upgrading the NVR. I would just add cameras that work with your current gear and make sure you have lenses that give you a nice tight field of view on what you want to see.