WirelessEye

I was looking at the auto track pano's- but am reluctant to spend the R&D money on seeing if they'll work in my situation.... isn't the auto track built into the camera which is analog? How would that work if I had an NVR running the camera through presets? I mean... wouldn't there be a conflict?

That's strange. It's been raining like crazy here, and no misting in any of our bullets. The only misting we had was when they first arrived from Asia, and that went away after a few weeks.

Is this camera powered by 12VDC? If so, go to your local auto parts store and buy a inline noise filter that usually mount to a car stereo. This will COMPLETELY remove DC line noise.

Interesting- I just read in SDM magazine that the reason for camera misting is because most (ok 90%) of cameras are assembled in Asia where there is high humidity. When they are shipped to different areas of the world with different climates, the atmosphere creates condensation in air tight seals. Hope this helps.

I would guess an arm, maybe even a leg. I have never used them, but I did talked to their reps at ASIS 2006 and their stuff looks pretty high end and seems to work rather well. If I had to guess, I'd say ~$2,000.

I can bring down wireless with a microwave oven Are you for real? I'd really like to see you bring down any of our wireless equipment with a microwave oven.... Since 90% of microwaves use ~2.4GHz and the other 10% use 915MHz, our equipment wouldn't even know the microwave was there. I guess I'm behind the times concerning wireless transmission of analog signals, what exactly is" our equipment" Our equipment is higher frequency (>5Ghz) I think you mentioned it was extra high frequency, but what is the name and model of the equipment? No names or models to give: We build our radios in-house from components we have tested to work well together to get optimum throughput, range and minimal signal loss--certainly better than any overpriced, off the shelf systems we've tried in the past.

Try these: www.ioimage.com www.mosaicgs.com

I can bring down wireless with a microwave oven Are you for real? I'd really like to see you bring down any of our wireless equipment with a microwave oven.... Since 90% of microwaves use ~2.4GHz and the other 10% use 915MHz, our equipment wouldn't even know the microwave was there. I guess I'm behind the times concerning wireless transmission of analog signals, what exactly is" our equipment" Our equipment is higher frequency (>5Ghz)

Of course H.264 compression file size definitely smaller than MPEG4. But in term of pricing..... it is pretty "nice" as well. Let's imagine 100 units of H.264 IP cameras or video server, how much will it cost.......hehe True, but since you are on costs, you must look at the BIGGER picture: Bandwidth Costs. Wouldn't you rather have a little more expensive up-front cost, and save a ton of $$ a month on what is already going to be super high bandwidth costs?

I can bring down wireless with a microwave oven Are you for real? I'd really like to see you bring down any of our wireless equipment with a microwave oven.... Since 90% of microwaves use ~2.4GHz and the other 10% use 915MHz, our equipment wouldn't even know the microwave was there.

MPEG4 - Smaller file size and better quality? h.263 is much smaller in terms of bandwidth (about 90% smaller) in my experience, however quality suffers. h.264 works by only decoding the pixels which have changed, and it does this in a "block mode". The lower the resolution, the more evident you'll see this. h.264 on the other hand is actually smaller than h.263, but is broadcast quality with much less blocking. Make sure you know what you're getting. But looking at the rest of your issues, this will be the least of your problems.

Whenever there are wires, you have the possibility of having your video feeds comprimised. Wireless/Solar on the other hand is much more difficult to bring down. $0.02

True, the processor to run auto tracking on a high number of PTZ's would be monsterous too. Best solution would be to use cameras like the new Pano's that have auto tracking built in.

We bring in a ton of IP Camera feeds into our central monitoring station. We currently have the capability to watch 200 feeds in our 2000 sq. ft. complex, and will soon be expanding our capability to 600 and over 6000 sq. ft. It does take a ton of servers, a massive SAN, ultra-mega-ungodly internet pipe, a rather large monitoring staff (with IV's full of coffee) and robust A/V equipment. But it's only money. =) Speed and performance are probably the best you can get with remote IP cams. Since 50% of our feeds are WLAN, our internet pipe doesn't have to be nearly as large as anyone else who is attempting to do what we do, but soon we'll be in the OC-12'ish area. I would make sure the monitoring center can handle that amount of cameras. I don't know of many that have the infrastructure, or the money to upgrade their infrastructure to meet your needs.

Are the infrared illuminators operated by a photocell for automatic turn on at dusk? If so, your lighting could be too close to the photocell- thus keeping the illuminators from ever coming on. If they are coming on and the picture is too dark, it sounds like the camera could be "over spec'd" by the manufacturer. What camera is it?

I've messed around with Aimetis. If it worked all the time, it would be great. Unfortunately, the reason we were looking at it for (ptz auto tracking) seemed to get confused at many times. Don't have much experience with Lenel, but that is for the plain and simple fact that after calling them at least a dozen times, I couldn't even get a sales person to return my call. If you can't get a sales person to return your call, forget about a tech support return call. ONSSI has analytics built into NetDVMS.

Call me crazy, but I would just have walked out calmly (with my glock) and held them there until the police arrived. On the other hand, if you would have had a Extreme CCTV Reg cam on there you probably would have gotten their plates too. We just got our first one and it's amazing, it doesn't see anything except for the plates-- strange but very effective.

Rooney, those are cool looking units, almost like mini versions of our mobile units. One question though, how vandal resistant are they? Looks like the tower isn't that tall and the solar is mounted at ground level-- at least in the pics on your site...

We had similiar issues on some bullet cameras we ordered. We sent them back, got new ones and it happened again. After about 2-3 weeks of continuous usage the condensation inside the cameras dissappeared. (Possibly due to thermal transfer)

As a company that ONLY does what you are trying to do, I will tell you right now that you will have problems with some of your requirements. Unless you are talking about fixed cameras with 1000 meter zoom range, you will most likely not be able to mount 4 cameras for use with solar. Anything past 2 (12VDC) PTZ's (Even if you could find one that can zoom 1000 meters optically) absolutely will eat up even a moderately sized solar system. To get a face or license plate (clearly) at over 1/2 mile would require a 50x or 60x optical lens-- neither of which are currently available with a dome style camera (I believe 35 or 36x is the highest). If you get an "Esprit" style positioner and mount a custom box camera with long range lens, you could probably get these specs (very expensive), but you will not be able to find anything in this realm that can run off of solar (at least reliably)-- they all take too much power. 500 meters of wireless is easy, pretty much anything you buy will do 500 meters. We have links that exceed 32,000 meters. Of course, you have to have height on both ends (80' to 100' at times) to accomplish this.

Basically if you are on a budget MSI is the most stable motherboard for the cheapest price. Asus is probably the best mainstream board, and DFI is probably the best "tweakers" board. Right now, I've found the "hot setup" is the Intel Core Duo Processor on a Asus SLI Deluxe motherboard. Rock solid reliability and speed.

Rory, from my experience of building 400-500 PC's-- never use Gigabyte motherboards. They have horrible support, which sucks because they have one of the highest observed failure rates of any motherboard manufacturer.

When we ran 2.4 we never had issues, but direct spectrum is much easier and less expensive to jam then higher frequencies that use OFDM

Why not just run trimese? Then you've got power/video/data all in one jacket.

Please explain "wireless analog" and "wireless digital". I was under the impression any kind of data going over a wireless connection was digitized.