My community had a string of break ins last night and our chief wants to look into a community wide camera system. I know theres a few on the forums that have done something similar. We need to connect 6 buildings that are all reletively close and the local security company quoted us at around 6000 to 9000 per location. Im sure cambium gear can do a wireless setup with a central brain to record remotely with epmp as backhaul or something. This is totally new ground for me so any help would be appreciated.
If it's a government agency then you should be able to use the licensed 4.9GHz band as long as the network isn't used for commercial use. Unfortunately, ePMP isn't licensed for the 4.9 band, so you'll need to use PTP or PMP450i.
Can all the buildings see one another with no obstructions in the way OR can all the buildings see one point with no obstructions in the way?
On the camera side of things, Cambium doesn't offer any products, but they do have a loose partnership with Axis Cameras and there's one Cambium RTM... Justin Robinson I think... that is well versed in both these disciplines. I don't think I've ever seen him on the forums, but I have his email and phone number and would be glad to PM them to you.
Thanks for the reply. all the building can see each other with no obstuctions and all buildings can see the tower on our ISp side. We are looking for cost effectiveness in tersm of the backhaul side and putting most of the money into the cameras. I seen this camera DS-2CD4A85F-IZH and it would be good for 2 of our sites. The rest just need maybe 8mp or even 4mp. Like i said i dont know alot about this stuff. Im researching like crazy right now. How much bandwidth do cameras consume? i know id need to set them to 70 up and 30 down typically but am not sure on how to link them all together to record at one location to save up to 30 days of recording and have remote access to either a cell phone or desktop. My thought was to install a 120 degree kp performance sector antenna with eomp 1000 ap and have the 12 or so cameras linked to a subscriber module using the extra aux port as poe for the camera. It sounds good in my head but i doubt its that easy lol. nothing ever is
We sometimes use a 5ghz ePMP AP lite with 3-8 SMs registered to it, and cameras feeding through those SMs. Set the AP to 70% uplink 30% downlink, if you have reasonable LoS (and/or close proximity) just set it to ACS and be done. (other facilities we've strung up a couple miles of fiber optics to link up a few dozen cameras across a few dozen acres of housing projects)
(disclaimer - in the Rockingham NC area we ARE the local security company, and the wireless ISP, and video security for area housing authorities, local/county LEO facilities, etc - among other hats like VOIP and AM/FM/2-way radio - if you already have the appropriate video skillset then ignore the following paragraph)
The cameras themselves, and the recorder, are a separate matter. You may have a simpler and less expensive experience just deferring to 'local security company' for this part. We often use VideoInsight for the NVR/DVR, and Vitek cameras. Be aware of the learning curve involved - if you've not worked with this type of video gear before you'll need to learn some things before committing to doing it officially on a 'large' scale, particularly on the matter of selecting/building a DVR/NVR system with sufficient horsepower and storage space for at least moderate future expansions. We recently ate a few thousand dollars when the owner quoted a system before we actually priced out the recorder that needs 48TB+ to meet their requirements of resolution, framerate, and archive duration - he just assumed that for 4x the storage it would scale to 4x the cost, which is almost never the case.
we use the Arecont Vision cameras with great success along with ExacqVision recorders or software. We use both 1000 lite AP with the Force 180 and intergrated SU's. we use both the 2.4 and 5 GHz models and the UBNT Rocket with their line of SU's. The Arecont Vision are a little costly but really work well and provide a lot of choices for the area you need to cover.
Thank you for your input. How are those cameras for night vision? One of the sites will be mounted on a utility pole theyre installing thats 40 feet or so above ground. im thinking night vision would need to be at lease 100 feet of coverage unless i can talk them into isntalling lights on the pole as well
Honestly, although we've set up quite a few systems, my only involvement in most cases is preprogramming the radios. More often than not I set them on 40mhz wide, 5ghz DFS channel, 70% uplink, 2.5ms.
As for the NVR/DVR, I mentioned in my reply above that we often use VideoInsight, but I usually have minimal involvement in that end of the project. In some earlier instances we built the system and installed the software, but they finally gave up on that a few years ago and we buy the servers prebuilt and certified these days.