Soundy

Catching taggers could be tricky - mere video of someone walking toward the wall with a spray can won't do for evidence, and unless you mount the cameras at head-height, an angle that catches the wall enough to catch the tagging in action, probably won't get any faces. You almost need to stick a camera or two in a tree in the field to the top of that picture, looking back at the 2/3/4 area.

*shudder*

I nominate this for Worst Install Ever... Not just for the level of some of the dumb stuff (120VAC speaker wire taped to transformer prongs? yo!), but the sheer scope of the stupidity, as from the sound of it, this extends to all cameras on the site. Juxtaposition plays in too - multi-million dollar site, you say?? Damn....

Yeah, that's one of the problems in this kind of situation - people don't want to pay what it takes to do it right the first time, so they do it half-assed... then it doesn't give them the coverage they need, something crucial is missed, and they think they've wasted their money. Any attempt to sell them more cameras after that is often seen by them as you trying to get them to throw good money after bad.

the OP is talking about powering a 12VDC CCTV Camera using 2 pair 4 conductor solid core 24awg wire, POE has nothing to do with CCTV cameras. PoE is also 48VDC (nominal), which means 1/4 the current draw of 12VDC (for the same power requirements) and thus less loss over an equivalent distance. Nevertheless, the original question was whether one "COULD use telephone wire", and the answer is, simply, YES. Whether that's a GOOD idea is a whole other question.

Hahahah, I love it And that lens setup is epic! I know there's a webpage somewhere that describes mounting a board camera to a door peephole for a fisheye lens... been wanting to try that one too

Isn't there power on top of the car already?

There's that too, although that still requires adding the Cat6 to the traveler.

Ah, yeah, the "double-balun" chaining is probably most of your problem. The untwisted run up the traveler shouldn't be an issue - I've run power and video to cameras in gas station pump canopies over standard station wire without a problem, and that's running past all kinds of AC power and along inside a fluorescent-lighted sign board. I think your best bet may be to just leave the existing cameras, if they're good enough quality already, use the existing traveler run and baluns to the control room, then come straight out the balun there and into an encoder. You'll need network into the control room, but you'd need that anyway if you were putting IP cams in the elevators. Fortunately, you should be able to do just a single network drop there, and a small switch for the encoders to plug into. Or, use a multi-camera encoder - four cameras to a single network port (Axis has several four-channel models). Worst case, if this doesn't work, you can then add the Cat6 drops down the travelers, put a switch at the top, and just pipe all your IP cameras down the one drop.

I'm not an expert on this, but considering that the existing wire you're using with the baluns is probably standard solid-core telephone wire, or maybe solid-core Cat3, I don't think stranded Cat6 would see a problem, at least not in the foreseeable future. We do have ONE elevator camera on one site, running on Cat5e, with no problems in the first two years. The wire was provided by the A/V company, who also run video to three small monitors using the other three pairs. You know what, I looked at them when a customer brought them in to a site I was working on... I don't remember offhand how they connected, and I didn't actually install them. I *think* (but don't quote me on this) that the camera board (mounted on a basic two-axis yoke) connected via a small wiring bundle to a back-board, and that board had a PCB-mounted RJ45 jack... but I could be wrong about that. Assuming I'm right though, the back-board might be able to go in behind your corner enclosure, or even on top of the car, with the interconnect wires extended as necessary. One other thought, if you do end up needing to retain the existing cameras, you could probably improve the quality by reducing the baluns to two per camera, just one at each end (you make it sound like there are multiple pairs in use *per camera*). Of course, that assumes the camera themselve don't just suck.

I'd recommend doubling the conductors, standard phone wire can be a little thin for some cameras' current requirements. We typically use the red and yellow together for positive, and the green and black together for negative.

Yeah, that's the one problem, the thermal stuff is NOT cheap. If memory serves, the FLIR WideEye runs in the $25k range... the SR-19s around $15k.

Some of the ACTi IP dome cams are essentially board cameras inside basic domes... you might be able to retrofit something like that. The big problem will be wiring - even IF you have two pairs available in the runner lines, it would be iffy to use that for ethernet. You MIGHT be able use something like Veracity HighWires in conjunction with the baluns - they're designed to let you run ethernet over existing coax, but I don't know how it would work with the baluns. You might be better off, if you don't actually need megapixel resolutions in the elevators, keeping the existing cameras there and using video servers (Axis makes some) to integrate them to your NVR setup.

If you can't find it in the setup menus, you could plug it into a router, and the router should show it in the DHCP Client Table.

I don't know if they make a PTZ. You could mount something like these SR-19s on a PTZ platform and get at least the pan-tilt function. On this particular site, we used two of these, and a WideEye model, which provides a full 180-degree view, essentially using two cameras in one box:

Oh sure. Thermal imaging looks very different from visible light imaging - generally the cooler something is, the darker it is in the picture. The image is unaffected by ambient light - images look pretty much the same day or night. Here are some examples, with a series of thermal cameras on top of a 50' tower, accompanied with a day/night Pelco Esprit PTZ: This is a FLIR SR-19 from just a few moments ago - contrast is low because heavy rain cools down everything: This is a visible-light image from approximately the same position, at the same time: From the same tower, in a different direction: And visible light: And for comparison, the same shot from the FLIR in the day:

Check out the thread here: http://www.cctvforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=11322&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=83 wow. nice setup. need a large housing to house this one. i have check avigilon's website they dont have ptz camera. the one used in the link was a professional HD series. Yeah, the range something like that would operate at, PTZ probably wouldn't be a huge benefit - you'd be placing it probably 10+km from the mountain and wouldn't be moving it more than a couple degrees anyway.

Yeah, if you're placing your camera a long way from the site, quality of optics will be critical - the lens alone mounted to that 16MP Avigilon listed above lists at $10,000. Yeah, really depends on your needs - again, whether it needs to be close to the site or not. Something closer, the housing and protection is going to be a LOT more critical. Oh yeah, I was gonna mention that too, thermal would be kick-ass for this purpose. FLIR is one of the big names in that area - www.flir.com

Check out the thread here: http://www.cctvforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=11322&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=83

Wow, that's a pretty esoteric purpose! Sounds cool, though (pun not intended)! I guess the first question is, what do you want to monitor exactly? Do you need close-up, high-detail video of things like crater activity and ground movements, or wide views of general activity, or...? I'd think something if you wanted something for long-term reliability, you'd want something fairly far away with a high resolution, so it's not damaged by the heat and corrosive gasses that are common to volcanoes. You'd certainly want a high-quality weather-sealed enclosure to protect the camera. At the high end of the scale, there's another thread here where a 16MP Avigilon camera with an effective 1200mm focal length that's used to view activities several miles away in pretty good detail... but you're looking at something in the range of tens of thousands of dollars.

Weird, dunno why it doesn't like it in your post.

Try using tags to embed pictures.

http://s739.photobucket.com/albums/xx37/Neptune769/ I dunno... works for me. Minimum post count maybe? Not sure what that is exactly.

Yeah, a half-bridge won't do the trick, you need a full bridge, which means however you hook it up, you'll have two diodes in line - that's AT LEAST a 1.2V drop (probably closer to 1.4V).

Is the camera itself staying on while the LEDs are blinking? Try metering the voltage at the camera, see if it drops significantly when the LEDs come on - my bet is that the current draw from the LEDs is causing the voltage to drop to a point that the LEDs shut off... then when they're off, the voltage goes back up to the point the LEDs can turn on again... and around goes the cycle.