Soundy

Ah, then I got nothin'. Sorry.

Wow... that looks like a gimpy sensor to me. POSSIBLE that the lens is faulty, but a physical problem with the camera itself is my guess. Either way, it doesn't look like something you can easily "repair" through any adjustments. First thing I'd do is try another lens... if that doesn't work, you'll probably need to return the camera.

"PTZ Controller" from www.serialporttool.com should do the trick. Runs as a fully-functional 15-day demo.

Tis easy! Just quote the entire thing and then insert (quote)(/quote) tags where necessary - (/quote) to end your text, add my reply, (quote) to start quoting your text again. You can also highlight a block of text and then click the "Quote" button above, and it will place the quote tags around that text for you. The old round XT keyboard connectors are called DIN connectors. The old keyboards typically used a 5-pin DIN. Newer PS/2 keyboards and mice use 6-pin mini-DIN. http://pinouts.ru/InputCables/DinToMiniDinKeyboard_pinout.shtml (BTW, you might want to bookmark that site - very handy for the kind of stuff you're doing!) You could try taking a photo of the connector and take that in to your electronic supplier to see if they have the right plug. If you need to source it online, you could try these guys: http://www.rpelectronics.com/electronic-components-parts/connectors/audio-video/din - they're a local retailer here, but they will do mail-order. There are lots of other parts houses online, as well. It's not possible to "burn out" a camera because of voltage loss. More likely, they just died because they were junk Keep in mind that current draw at 24V will be half that of 12V, so losses will be half as much as well. This calculator is handy for figuring out the losses to expect over different Cat5 configurations: http://www.netkrom.com/voltage_loss_over_cat5_calculator.html BTW, my standard for using Cat5 to cameras has always been blue pair for video, orange and green for power, and brown left for spare, data, or additional power if required (so far, it hasn't ever been required). No particular reason other than they being colors that made sense to my male logic. We use mainly dual-voltage cameras and 24VAC power supplies as well. Funny how just "talking" about a problem will sometimes lead you to a solution! Some DVRs will accept joystick input and pass that on to the camera... but yours probably isn't one. You need something like a signal combiner... I've looked them up before and found them stupidly expensive... then found a schematic for one and discovered it consists of little more than a diode matrix to isolate the two sources. Actually, "professional grade" ready-built PTZs almost universally DO have autofocus and auto-iris - I've never seen one that didn't. This may come as a surprise to you, but what you have there is a Frankencamera that is not representative of professional systems Always a good idea. Three words: portable DVD player. Got mine for $30 on Craigslist. Works like a hotdamn. Just make sure you find one with A/V input (most have A/V out, but not all also accept input). Check this thread for more discussion: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=23767 Pelco is a major CCTV manufacturer. Pelco D and P are two control protocols that they designed; there are many others and most manufacturers have their own proprietary designs, but the Pelco ones are almost universally supported as "generic" protocols. As for RS485 - Wikipedia is your friend: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rs485

I'd love to use proper labels even for roughing-in wire - the printable heat-shrink stuff. Writing directly on the wire is fine, but I've often seen it get rubbed off through the pull. With dark-colored wire, you have to use the "silver metallic" sharpie, which is far less durable than the permanent black... or you have to wrap light-colored tape, but I've often seen tape come off once you start putting lube on the wire.

I considered telling him to check the power connections as well, but apparently the cameras are still powered, because he can hook a monitor up to them directly and still get picture...

I'd start with re-terminating the signal cable; it's possible the temperature and/or moisture is affecting them or causing corrosion.

i definitely dont recommend anyone use telco wire for CCTV. (aka Station-Z) Thin cable that can be cut with a butter knife. As opposed to Cat3/Cat5e - 22ga. vs 24? Okay, we get that you're stuck in the 80s down there, technology-wise. For the rest of the developed world, it IS actually a valid option.

It was leading to if they "might" be spending $10,000-$20,000 on cameras in a few years time which cameras might or might not even exist at that time, then they would hardly think twice about spending a measly little $500 to run wire. If one really wants to plan for a future that we dont know anything about, we might as well just stick the home underground or in a bubble. You missed (or ignored) the other point: sometimes running new cable just isn't practical, or even possible. Prime example is cabling from a gas station office to the pumps, where conduit must be sealed by pouring liquid chico into the pipes, where it hardens into a foot-long concrete-like plug. Removing that plug is, in most cases, impossible without damaging either the cable or the conduit. Sites with drop ceiling are great... but not everywhere uses drop ceiling. We did a restaurant site recently that was a very old building - the entire dining room area had a ceiling of 2x12 joists, with the roof built directly on top the joists and the sheetrock ceiling secured directly to their underside, and fiberglass insulation packed tight in between. Other than two return-air vents at opposite corners of the room, there was no direct access to the space in between without cutting large access hatches, which the customer ixnayed right off the top. It took three days to wire the eight new dining room and patio cameras (two IP, six analog), going out the wall of the office, up the outside wall, over the roof, and dropping the runs back down through HVAC vents adjacent to the camera locations. If it had been a matter of re-using existing coax for the IP cams, that would have been FAR more cost-effective, even with the high cost of ethernet-over-coax adapters... unfortunately all the existing coax was already spoken for. So... no, it's rarely as simple as a "quick rewire".

I've never heard of an "industry standard" for this. I use blue for video, orange and green for power, and leave brown for a spare (future video, RS485, or if a little more power capacity is needed). Most jobs, two pairs are fine for power, especially if you're using 24VAC (current draw is half that of 12VDC; thus, voltage drop is less). Plug the numbers in this calculator and see: http://www.netkrom.com/voltage_loss_over_cat5_calculator.html It's completely arbitrary; there is no published "standard". You can use whatever pairs make sense to you. For me, orange and green were the most "power-like" colors; blue being the "center pair" on an RJ45 connector made it seem like a logical choice for video. No reason to go that way other than aesthetics. "Cheap" baluns are not a contributing factor, per se. General passive balun design is 1/3 of the issue, coupled with cheap 12VDC camera design, and common-channel power supplies. No one part of the equation is necessarily a bad design, it's just a matter of three particular design concepts that don't get along. Expensive passive baluns will typically have the same issue; cheap baluns generally work fine with dual-voltage or 24VAC cameras. Using individual power supplies with each camera bypasses the problem, too. The baluns we use cost $8-$13/pair and work just as well in my testing as the $35/ea. baluns. My cost analysis is based on listed retail prices for Cat5e and RG59, which both cost the same at this particular store; I'm pretty sure our wholesale cost is a good bit less on Cat5e than on RG59. Add the cost of power wire, and the gap narrows even more. Reduced labor costs easily tips the balance in favor of UTP. Keep in mind, baluns will work over just about any wire, every bit as well as they do over Cat5e. I've run video and power on 22/4 Station-Z wire without a problem. They work on Cat3. They work on speaker wire, line cord wire... you name it. If it's ONLY about cost, Cat3 should cost about 1/3 of Cat5e. Station-Z is even cheaper.

You're just talking about labeling cable, though... there are lots of other things to be labeled on a job. Like power supplies and/or power supply channels. On intercoms, I make labels marking which channel is what. Anything that's going to be in view of the customer or the public, just looks a lot more professional with a proper label rather than sharpie-on-PVC.

As Rory notes, rates will vary depending on a lot of factors. Going rate in this area, I think, is anything from $75 to $150/hr. Part of it is based on what the market will bear. Some of it is based on the area a company has to cover - our main service area is probably about the same size as the entire collection of Bahamian islands that Rory's in, but we also cover most of southern BC, which is probably closer to the size of California. Rates have to reflect the maintaining of equipment and service vehicles, travel, and so on.

http://www.veracityglobal.com/products.aspx http://gemelec.com/index.php?page=shop.browse&category_id=68&option=com_virtuemart&Itemid=1 Just a couple of many types of ethernet-over-coax solutions.

http://www.veracityglobal.com/products.aspx

Most electricians charge around $25 per run here to pull wire, so could always just pull new wire if it came down to that, at say $1000 per IP camera compared to say $100 per CCTV camera ... $25 per run plus $200 for the cable is peanuts. Not sure what your math is leading to... the point is that pulling Cat5e rather than coax in the first place saves you that expense altogether. Besides simply "adding new runs" later isn't always as easy as "just pulling new wire". At least not in most of North America, where you have to adhere to building and electrical codes...

My favorite was my now-defunct 10" DVD player - it had the reversible screen (turns around and lays flat), high-capacity built-in battery, and really nice protective case with two straps that are designed to attach it to the back of a car headrest, but which work equally well to secure it to the top of a ladder, the railings of a manlift, or even to dangle it safely from a camera mounting bracket. It had an SD card slot and USB port where I could load up some flash memory with all my test patterns in video or JPG format, and also ran off 12VDC, so I could power it off my test battery (7.5Ah gel-cell also used to power cameras for testing) if I forgot to charge it. Alas, it just stopped working one day... appears to be a problem with the power board, but we couldn't trace it down to a component, so we couldn't get it running again.

The ONLY issue I've seen using baluns, that can be specifically ascribed to the use of baluns (that is, not an issue that is caused by something else or could equally affect regular coax installations - like EMI, power losses, etc.) is the introduction of ground loops when using cheap 12V cameras that use a common ground for video and power. First you need to understand what a ground loop is: http://www.epanorama.net/documents/groundloop/basics.html And what it does: To understand how a balun creates a problem, you need to look at the design: Each side of the signal goes through several hundred or thousand transformer windings, which effectively adds a few hundred feet to the signal path. So a 100' run would translate into several hundred feet of actual wire, with added resistance. Now cheap 12V cameras typically have a single ground connection for both video and power; the cabling just splits that out into two wires, but if you look inside, you'll find the grounds both tie to the same point. But where both runs normally end up being about the same length (usually within a few percentage points) when you have separate coax and power lines, you now have one ground connection that's a few hundred percent longer than the other, with suitably higher resistance. This isn't a problem if you just have one camera connected, because you don't have two ground paths to the same point... but once you start connecting two or more cameras, you start getting all kinds of multiple paths with widely varying resistances, since a camera will have one path to ground via its own power wire, and another path via the other camera(s) - that is, it finds an electrical ground through the its signal ground, then through another camera's signal ground (since the cameras' signal grounds are all tied together in the DVR), and then through that camera's power ground back to the power supply. I've found that you can usually get away with two cameras on one supply with minimal noise, but more than that, things start to get really weird - I've had it where some cameras cleared up and others got worse as the number of cameras increased. So, there are a couple ways around it. One, you can use separate power supplies (ie. wall warts) for each camera. Or, you can use a power can with electrically isolated outputs (rare and expensive). Or you can add ground-loop isolators to the signal lines, which insert a transformer to break the physical electrical path. Better cameras with built-in power regulation, including dual-voltage and 24VAC cameras, avoid the issue, because the power and video grounds are electrically separated - the power ground just goes into the regulator/rectifier and is not tied to the signal ground. Edit: this is also only an issue with passive baluns - active baluns electrically break the signal lines, so using one or both active should avoid the problem as well.

I'd love to get one, but I can't afford it out my own pocket, and the boss doesn't want to spring for one because he figures we don't label things enough to make it worthwhile (maybe that's because we don't HAVE a labeller??)

Of course, if you DO pull all coax and then find yourself needing to go to IP later, you're faced with the prospect of either pulling new wire, or using Highwires or similar type devices to run ethernet-over-coax, at a cost of $100/camera or more (I think the last time we used the actual Veracity Highwires, they ran around $175 *each*, two required per camera). There is the "promise" of HDcctv that runs uncompressed SDI video over "existing" coax. That promise has been on the books for about two years now, and the hardware is just starting to come to market. Reports thus far don't have it working very well on RG59 - no more 100' with any reliability.

We only use plenum cable when code requires it. Not only is it more expensive, it's a pain to work with, as the jacket tends to be really stiff and brittle (Cat5 *and* coax). I don't know offhand what our wholesale price is for it, but looking at a local retailer, they list: Cat5e PLENUM 1000' - $276 Cat5e RISER shielded 1000' - $166 Cat5e RISER 1000' - $89-$109 depending on the color Cat5e + RG6quad Siamese 500' - $178 RG6 1000' - $89 RG6U Quad 1000' - $128 RG59 + 18/2 Siamese 500' - $158 They don't list straight RG59U in bulk, but they do have it at 40c/ft. Not finding a listing for straight 18/2 either, other than as speaker wire... http://www.rpelectronics.com/wire-cable-management/cable-bulk

Do you normally run power over Cat5? If so, at what length runs do you normally experience power loss? Yup... my normal wiring scheme is: Blue pair for video Orange pair for DC+/AC hot Green pair for DC-/AC neutral Brown pair for data/spare Haven't yet had any power problems. Of course, we don't use cheap IR cameras, so power demands tend to be minimal (I think the VCM-24VFs are a whopping 160mA or something). Most of the cameras we use are dual-voltage as well, so we normally use 24VAC supplies. Longest runs with this setup have been in the 200'+ range.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, "not really."

Shielded cable is of minimal value unless you ground the shield at one end... I've yet to find readily-available, user-installable RJ-45 plugs for shielded. When using baluns, shielding shouldn't be needed except in extreme conditions - the balanced line inherently rejects noise. When we started using baluns, the cheapest we could get were over $35 each... wholesale. These days I can get GEM minis for <$10/pair. I did some testing with a near-full box of Cat5e (so, around 800' of coiled cable) and a variety of baluns ranging from $13/pair models to $45/ea units with built-in surge suppression, and found little to no visible difference in image quality. Since RG59 and Cat5e run about the same price (at least when we buy by the 1000' box), baluns running <$10/pair is a definite savings, after you factor in the need to run power alongside the coax (we normally use 22/4 Station-Z wire), and the fact that pulling two different types of cable together can be a real hassle, especially if you have to stage out multiple pulls.

Why, If the dvr can handle the NTSC signal ? From what I can understand (I'm a newbie in cctv field) the NTSC signal will flow between the camera and the DVR, and then the video output from Vga or ethernet, has nothing to do with NTSC. This was an "advice" of the store sales rep glf. the problem is not the dvr most will offer both. its with you buying both NTSC cameras. your going to be recording in NTSC how are you going to view footage once off the dvr. Er.... are you not exporting to AVI, H.264, MPEG, or other format where NTSC/PAL standards don't apply? Name me one DVR that actually records in pure NTSC/PAL - most aren't even recording at full framerate. Same way you do now: playback on a computer, or burn to DVD-Video, which can be done in the appropriate video format by the DVD authoring software.