SEANHAWG

12V DC or 24 VAC. The only problem is, what would you do when the battery runs out? It would be a pain to constantly recharge. Besides the power trying to reach that far, I also think you will have problems with a video signal going that far. Perhaps some Cat5 or fibre guys on this board can help you on that. I am strictly a coax guy and I think that may be a little out of reach for coax.

Does Dahua and Hikvision allow you to buy directly from them or do you have to go through one of their distributors?

I'm a big fan of twist on. I can do install them in no seconds flat now. I've worked with them so much that I prefer them over Crimp on now. But if you are not used to them then it is not too hard to get a bad connection. I agree with the others as I think its a bad connection somewhere since you did see it come up once. Try re-applying on your connectors to see if that helps. Just like Adam said, if the shielding is touching the center conductor, it will detrement or kill the video signal, its a common problem among folks installing for the first time.

Depending on which ultrak cameras you have it will most likely hook up to any DVR. Most all Ultrak cameras use BNC connections, though I have seen some with the Telephone type connections. If BNC, just use RG59 cable and BNC connectors.

Dang, thats a long way. Is there any power source that you can power the camera closer to the cameras location?

Ahh yes. I forgot to mention firewalls. I would temporarily disable all firewalls on both networks until you get it working. Once you get it working, then go in and configure what can pass through your firewalls.

Check to make sure all of your ports are open. Go to your hosted LAN network and visit WWW.CANYOUSEEME.ORG It should pull up your WAN IP address and type in all of your ports that you use for your DVR and see if they are open. Are you sure you are using the correct WAN IP address at the time you are logging in from the remote location? I have a Dynamic IP and whenever I type in an "Old" IP, it still gives me the login screen but it wont let me login. I then notice that my IP has changed to a different IP, so whenever I type in the right IP, it lets me login. Of course if you have your dyndns configured correctly this should not be an issue.

If you are talking remote zoom then that takes the VBM-24VF out of the equation. I think it has digital zoom but I wouldnt use that as it just makes the picture look crappy. It may be hard to find an equivalent zoom camera with about the same specs as the VBM-24VF without paying a good sum for one.

We have a customer who knows alot about equipment for Paranormal research. He actually takes some of our cameras and converts them somehow to make them alot more sensitive to light to be used for Paranormal reasearch. He also has some other good cameras too and he could probably refer you to a good DVR to use for that purpose. I PM'ed you his information.

If it were me I would just use a seperate cheap IR illuminator. You can get some for indoor use for pretty cheap, especially if its not too far of a view.

I bought the Cantonk 4 channel DVR and didnt like it. I guess for the price it wasnt bad but it had several features that I didnt like. For example: 1) It only allowed 1 camera playback at a time, not 4 cameras. Apparently they had a firmware update that takes care of this problem. 2) Whenever I did a factory default reset, it set everything back to chinese. It was a pain in the butt to try to find out how to change it back to english. 3) They advertise D1 recording. This is only possible if you are recording only 1 channel. This means if you want to record in D1, you have to choose 1 channel to record and all of the rest cannot be recording. If you want to record all 4 channels simultaneously, you have to use CIF. 4) They advertise 30 FPS recording which is also not true, it appears to be more like 15-20 FPS. You can definetely notice its "stop and go" nature.

I dont think they are phasing them out as far as I know. The distributors are still selling them full swing.

I thought it was outside the range too but the router actually gives me the specific range and it went up to 255 for the last 3 digits. Thats why I thought it was odd. Oh well. From now on, I will just let the DVR assign the IP. Now I got to get the router figured for a dyndns but I dont think that will be difficult at all.

Boom Shocka Locka! I got it figured out and it was something really simple yet odd. This whole time I was using my own assigned IP for the DVR of 10.0.0.200 and even though this was within the DHCP pool, anytime I forwarded a Port to that IP, the port would be blocked or put in "stealth mode" So I just went into the DVR and used the DHCP tool that the DVR had and it picked an IP for me of 10.0.0.5, I forwarded the ports to this IP and it worked fine. Why? I dont know exactly but I am glad it works. It seems it should still work with the IP of 10.0.0.200 but anytime I could not get any ports to work with this. I did learn tons in this process so I consider it a valuable experience. I did find a pretty cool tool along the way that will check all of your 1,056 to determine the status of them, it is: https://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?bh0bkyd2 There is actually several good information at that site and I recommend it to anyone. Thanks to everyone that helped.

Well I got Logmein but for some reason I cant log into work from my home but I can log in from any other location just fine like from Panera bread or Starbucks. I think it may have something to do with my slow hughes net satellite internet connection at my house, my house is out in the boonies and I can choose between that or dial-up. I may try the Ultra VNC to see if I have better luck.

Thanks for the great info. I will give that a shot today if my wife lets me get away to the office. I have tested several DVR's over the past few months but this is the first one that I tried to network over the internet. The good thing about this atrocious experience is that I have learned tons.

Yeah the IP changed again so thats probably why you couldnt access the router. I just accessed it just fine. At my location DSL is the fastest internet we get. Its really the only alternative at my location and its pretty fast in my neck of the woods. When I signed up I signed up for the biggest package, at the time I had no need for a static IP, much less, I didnt even know what a static IP was back then. At this point, I think its a ISP problem so I really wont be able to get down to the issue until I call them but I think the phone call will be one of those where you have to explain what you are trying to do over and over and the rep on the other side has no idea what you are talking about. Whats wierd is that I can access my router's admin page from a remote location using port 8080, but when I try to use that port for my DVR, it wont work, whats up with that. Shouldn't that work?

My DSL uses a Dynamic IP if thats what you mean. It changes throughout the day but it will usually stay the same for a matter of hours which gives me enough time to test it. And yes I did set up my router for remote access and I can access it just fine. It uses port 8080. I can access that fine from a remote location. I tried using this 8080 for my HTTP port in my DVR and didnt get any success. Isnt the static ip I am using 1.0.0.200 within my DHCP range? My DVR allows me to change the ports to whatever I like. Regarding port mapping on my router, I am not sure. I dont think my router allows this unless you seen it somewhere within the pictures above. I tried it both ways, with just TCP only and tried it with TCP/UDP Which one are you talking about? The 1.0.0.200? That is the one that you told me to try that worked when I tried it locally. Or are you talking about the 1.0.0.1? If you are talking about that, you can see that is my local IP address in one of the first pictures I posted. I am sure this has something to do with my ISP but its really bugging the tar out of me that I cant figure this out. This will make me lose sleep until I get it figured out.

I was thinking about that on the way home, but I figure one of the 3 ports that I had listed would not be blocked. I have att/yahoo dsl and I couldnt find anything on the web that these ports were blocked. I will have to give them a call to find out though. Also, I turned off all of my firewalls in that network Also, just for the heck. I set the default DMZ server to 10.0.0.200 because after reading a previous post on this thread, I was under the assumption that this would allow the DVR to be accessed even without port forwarding. This did not work either.

I have literally worked on this and scoured the web all day long and I have no clue what is wrong. I cant seem to get the ports to open. This is beyond frustrating. Do I need to configure anything within here?

Hi Rory, I did as you said and tested it locally and it did work. I then went into my router and added the following port forwards: I then went to test them with the link you gave and none of them worked. They all said, connection timed out. You can test this to see if you get any login screen if you want to, go to: 71.153.135.110 Or see if you get any prompt to download anything.

I will also note that I just turned off my router and my DSL "thing" and turned them back on again. I went to IP chicken and I now have a new IP address.

I will try that, but I will note than whenever I try to enter the IP chicken IP address into my browser here at work, It says "unable to connect" Even when I have it set up with DHCP Do you think it will be any different when I get home? Its like I cant connect to my router or something??!

Okay so we've gotten in several DVR's lately and I have yet to try to connect them to the internet. Until today. Yeah, I know, I am a little behind. What I thought was going to be a simple task ended up in a multi hour event. I am about to explode trying to figure this out. I have ATT DSL internet service and I think it has something to do with their ghetto settings. Here is what I have done so far. (this was yesterday and it was before I knew anything about port forwarding, so I did not set up my router with port forwarding) 1) I got the automatic acquisition of an IP address using DHCP. It gave me 10.0.0.7. 2) If I type that into my browser, I can log into my DVR from work just fine because the DVR is in the same network as my computer is at work. 3) But when I went home and typed in 10.0.0.7, it gives me the dreaded "cannot connect....." Now, I have set up port forwarding in my router and I have yet to test it from a remote location yet, but I have a feeling that when I get home and type in 10.0.0.7 into my computer, I have a feeling that it still will not connect. 10.0.0.7 does not sound like a unique enough IP to work. I think I am doing something wrong. So here was my quest on trying to set up a static IP address. 1) I went to IP chicken and found out that my IP was: 71.153.137.95. I also confirmed this in my Routers Admin page. In a matter of fact, for your reference here is my routers status page: 2) So what I did was enter this info into my DVR's Net Settings, again here is a pic of what I did: 3) Next, I added a port forward on my router. The router would not let me put 10.0.0.1 as the gateway so it automatically put 10.0.0.2. Some may be thinking well, you need to put 10.0.0.2 in your router then (I will get to that in a moment) 4) I now type 71.153.137.95 into my IE browser bar and get the dreaded "could not connect" and let me remind you that this is at my work where the DVR is in the same network as my computer. 5) Next I changed the gateway number in my DVR to 10.0.0.2 and that did not work either. 6) Also, I tried changing the subnet mask in my DVR to 255.255.255.255 and then I save it but the DVR does not seem to save that setting because I go back into the DVR menu and the subnet mask setting reverts back to 255.255.255.0 7) Okay so I am stumped at this point, so I remember that ATT has these ghetto PPoE settings so I go into my DVR menu and enter in my username and password. That still gets me nowhere. What the heck am I missing? Is their an easier way to do this for gosh sakes. One thing I did notice was when I tried to see if my router needed updates, it said it could not retrieve updates because there was no internet connection. This is not correct because the current computer I am using is directly connected to the router and I am on the internet right now. Any help is greatly appreciated

For troubleshooting purposes, try removing the RS-485 + & - wires to see if that makes it stop. Just run power and video the camera. This will determine if its a bad communication problem between your controller and camera.