Soundy

Just explain it like that: ANY cable can break under constant flexing, period. The smaller it is, the greater the chance, and solid core is more likely to break than stranded. This is a simple fact of life. Add to that, if the cable was nicked or kinked anywhere, that creates a weak point that will break sooner... even if it was kinked and then straightened out during installation. Like Chris and Tailbone say, your best option is to find another free pair in the original traveler cable, which IS designed for the constant flexing... it only needs one pair; camera power can usually be pulled from existing line voltage ON the car (if there isn't one, have an electrician put in a outlet on the car roof).

Nothing wrong with Cat5e *as such*... given the choice though, I wouldn't use a solid-core UTP for an elevator traveler cable. Stranded Cat5e or Cat6 would be preferable... or better yet, something that's a larger gauge, like 20 or even 18 stranded. Nobody says baluns HAVE to use UTP; it's just usually the most convenient. I've used them on station-Z wire (22/4 solid), 20/2 shielded, and 18/2 (in one case, actually, one run on all three... the results were a little soft, I wouldn't recommend mixing and matching cable types like that).

"Best" is really subjective in this industry... the real question is, what's RIGHT for YOUR needs? How many cameras are you talking about? What kind of coverage do you need? What's the area to be covered? What kind of detail is required? Are you looking for analog or IP cameras, or a mix? Standalone or PC-based DVR? If PC-based, do you want a turnkey system, or a do-it-yourself setup? And most importantly, what is your budget?

I would suspect the constant flexing has caused a breakage; it is, after all, very thin (24ga.) solid core. Have you used all the pairs, or is there another pair you could switch to?

Should work... What did this whole thing cost, like, $40?

How about IP cameras that just upload directly to FTP on their own?

That's the one... so for the camera displayed, you'd set external port to 10057, internal port to 80, and IP to 192.168.1.57 ... and under Application you could put the name or location of the camera, just to keep things organized. It seems like a little thing, but not needing to keep track of changing ports on cameras really does make life easier... even moreso, as I say, if you're doing a customer's setup, where there's a chance someone else might have to deal with your setup some day.

Mike, I don't have a 54G handy to check (all of mine have been flashed to DD-WRT), but if memory serves, you can use the "Single Port Forward" page to forward a different outside port, to port 80 at the given IP on the LAN, which allows you to keep the standard port 80 on the camera. Simplifies things a bit because you don't have to change all the camera settings, and the NVR settings with it.

I can access the OSD. Interesting... I had a couple of these just recently. One seemed to be a problem with the iris not opening up, the other was an iffy connection in the cable bundle between the camera board and the processing board behind it. Both have been returned to the distributor now...

As noted, it's all in the housing... see this thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=22339 There's also the DBM-24VF, which AFAIK is the same dome design as the VBM, but plastic instead of cast aluminum (for indoor mounting where vandal protection isn't necessary), and the BBM-24VF, which is a "box" style with a C/CS lens mount, but essentially the same innards.

Good thinking on that. Of course, that leads to the issue of needing to stock and pull multiple kinds of cables... and leaves no room for expansion... like, what if you wanted to add a PIR to the zone? You don't have the extra wire to power it then, as you would with at least standard 22/4 Station-Z wire. Not a problem with baluns with clip-down/punch-down terminals

What are the color bands on the resistor? You need to look for a replacement that has the same color bands (resistance and tolerance), and is the same size (wattage) and type.

Welcome!

Yeah, probably not the best bet for speaker-level audio... but for line-level, no problem. We do this on fuel sites, where the DVR goes in an electrical room and they want to monitor/control it from the office. The extenders we use include a set of "console" ports on the "local" module, so you can have a keyboard/monitor/mouse AT the machine, and another set at the "remote" module at other end of a Cat5 cable. On the sites that use separate NVR and HD Viewer machines, we hook the inputs of the extender to a KVM switch as well, to toggle between machines. The only limitation to most of these extenders (well, all of them I've looked at so far) is that they don't do regular USB (even the ones for USB keyboard/mouse, ONLY work with keyboard/mouse)... but there are separate USB-over-UTP extenders as well, so with a second Cat5 run, you can bring your USB ports to your remote console as well.

Is there a "click" when it switches modes? That would be the ICR flipping out of the way... normally the picture should get brighter momentarily when it switches to B&W, because of the filter moving out of the way. From the description, I don't get the idea that this actually has any moving parts... electrolysis is just an electrical reaction process.

I would expect so... simply because there shouldn't be a significant difference between how the various cameras from one manufacturer interface. However, you could try contacting QNAP and asking them - I've found their support people to be very helpful and responsive.

There shouldn't be an issue with interference - the balun (BALanced/UNbalanced) concept itself is inherently resistant to EMI/induced noise. Note that you can use Cat5 for your monitor return runs as well (you can run four video signals over that one wire, in fact). Audio can also be run over Cat5, with the appropriate baluns. In fact, there are baluns/transceivers/extenders available to run just about any sort of signal you want over Cat5 - VGA, component, HDMI/DVI (those are kinda spendy though), audio, even KVM (remote keyboard/video/mouse). I think the only type I HAVEN'T seen is for CATV/MATV (cable/antenna TV RF signals), although I'm sure they exist. Even the alarm system can use the Cat5 (although alarm guys generally don't like it - they think it's too flimsy/brittle... I think they're just too brute-force on it ) The problem with most 12VDC-only cameras, unless they have a built-in regulator, is that the video and power share a common ground... when you add a pair of baluns, you're inserting several hundred feet of extra wire (the transformer coils) into both sides of the signal path, which then creates multiple different-length ground paths for each camera (via the power ground and the video ground)... and that often leads to ground-loop issues when you're using a power can where the cameras all share the same ground connection. There are two ways around this, if you're using 12VDC: use cameras with built-in regulators or dual-voltage cameras, or use a power source with isolated grounds for each camera. A central power can like that gets REALLY spendy... the alternative is individual wall-wart power supplies for each camera. Personally, therefore, I'd plan for a 24VAC central can, and try to spec dual-voltage or 24VAC cameras if at all possible. If you DO find you need one or two specific cameras that are 12VDC-only, you can use wall-warts for those, or as I say, slap a small regulator board inside your power can (power it off one of the 24VAC channels) to feed those cameras. Never hurts to plan ahead - as my co-worker says, "I'd rather be looking at it, than looking for it!"

No snow here in Vancouver, either. Pretty f'n depressing, actually.

I'd say that's a good guess, that would explain the constant buzzing as it tries to activate the filter. Is it in color or B&W mode? Does it change modes when it gets dark? If the filter is stuck in place, it would probably go B&W at night but stay fairly dark... if the filter is stuck "out of place" then the color in the day would seem really "off" and possibly washed out.

I'll see your 9-13" and raise you: I mean, really, it's just not possible to REALLY get a clear focus on a piddly 13" screen; you really need something almost 3 times the size.

It's a bit of a learning curve if you're not used to 3D CAD software, and like Tom says, sometimes a pad and pencil is just as fast and effective, but if you have the time to learn it, I imagine it would take no time at all to bang out a design once you're familiar with it. Two of our major clients have floor plans of all their sites in PDF format... one thing I like to do is load those up into Adobe Illustarator (or InkScape, an opensource clone), where the whole thing is vectorized, and I can easily add camera icons, coverage angles, and so on to a drawing, then re-export as PDF, JPG, or whatever suits.

I don't think being snarky will speed up the process... Just sayin'...

QNAP has a couple different variations - they make an NVR-specific system that you can use as basic NAS storage (I believe it supports both SMB and FTP access); they also have a line of NAS systems with UPnP media server, FTP, web, PHP, MySQL, Bonjour, etc. etc. etc., that have limited support for some network cameras (I don't know about the Axis stuff specifically). Take a look at http://www.qnap.com for the latter, http://www.qnapsecurity.com for the former. Edit: compatibility charts: http://www.qnap.com/pro_compatibility_camera.asp

If you DO want something to play with, check out IP Video System Design Tool at www.jvsg.com