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Friendly trouble shooting tip that may save you debug time

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I ran into an interesting issue today during an install. My customer is currently under construction and in the old section of his store he want me to connect a couple temporary analog cameras to give him coverage of a couple key spots.

 

I am using all cat 5 cables with baluns.

 

Anyhow, connected the camera to his Avermedia EH5216+ Hybrid DVR. He has 3 other dome cameras currently flush mounted into the drop ceiling in the new section of the building and these latest two temporary cameras are box cams (super circuits he had laying around) mounted to the drop ceiling grid with drop ceiling clip mounts. Low and behold the two temp cameras have severe noise protrayed by horizontal lines moving vertically. I spent the next 2 hours trying to fix the issue. Since he had old florescents in there I figured maybe it was those since the camera were mounted about 1.5' from them. I took the camera down and placed it on my ladder and the video cleared up......YEP must be those darn lights so lets try and prove it further. I put the camera back up and turned the lights off and the noise didn't change it was still horrible. WHAT THE!! Tried a different camera he had there and it still did the same thing. Well I'll wrap this up because this could get long.

 

The drop ceiling grid was grounded to the old florescents creating a difference in potential that was conducted to the camera through the metal frame of the bracket. Put a strip of black electrical tape to insulate the clip from the grid and the picture was beautiful. This was a new one to me, having the drop ceiling grid with a ground potential on there that messed up the video! I mean I was thinking powersupply issue, bad baluns, those darn florescent baluns and all it needed for a quick fix was a piece of electrical tape acting as an insulator lol!

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Thanks, I'll put that in my memory bank. This is why this forum helps a lot of us by you ALL sharing the knowledge that you have, so we're smarter for our customers

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