ZoneMinder Forums

I need to place a camera (b&w or color) about 2000 feet (direct burial) from my zm machine. There is no power available at the camera location. What type of cable/camera system can span this distance?

You might have to run two lines, one for power and one for video. There are a couple options.
Use active baluns and run video over CAT5.
Use coax with amplifier.
Use fiber (eeww, spendy)

Look here for some ideas.

Regards,
Corey

I concur with Corey, cat 5 cable and active rx's. Nvt is what we use

What's the range of those?

PoE with CAT5 has a limit of 100m / ~330ft (same as normal CAT5) so IP may not a great solution as you'd need to provide hub/routers at least five times during that run - unless... a PoE powered hub exists and can be used to power another hub and device further on (daisy chaining)?

However, I don't know if such devices exist or how well they react to being buried, but it may be a path worth exploring.

Alternatively; Car battery, inverter, solar charger and wireless IP camera. Wild guess - a decent car battery should power a cam for a week or so without charging, and low wattage inverters are incredibly cheap now - in fact, check the camera's voltage, you may even be able to bypass the inverter if the camera is 12v.

2000ft line-of-sight may be possible with most wireless cams, if not a directional receiver should compensate, or a repeater where you can get a signal and avoid the need for a lot of cabling.

well the active tx and rx will do 6 km but you can go further if needed, but after that its mainly fibre. But its composite not ip

So if I use active baluns and cat 5 can I also use some of the unused pairs for the power transmission?

No, you would not be able to run power on cat5 in that range. you can run 24 volts AC for ~100 feet or 48 volts AC for ~300 feet but thats the limit of what you can do on cat5.

You will need a remote power source or run a extra 16 ga. pair to get power out at your camera.

Regards,
Corey

lol yeah you could run the power down it but only if you plan on powering an led! 1000ft is that about 300m? even if you used 3 pairs for power id expect you to have problems. You need a local supply or a much bigger cable for power

Sorry guys we're talking about ca. 700 m

1. If you have line of sight then just use Directional Wireless LAN to bridge that distance. Yes you will still need to run a power cable. No easy solutions there.

This is maybe not the most stable solution but certainly the cheapest.

2. from our telecomunication guy

Create your own little DSL network.
A DSL router on either side and some cheap CAT3 cabeling.
Depending on the encoding this can bridge up to 15 km (10 miles).
Once again you will have to run a power cable.

This is probably a more expensive solution, but stable.

how would you do this little dsl network. Can you just put 2 routers back to back, i assume its a little more involved

As someone who's done a *lot* of cable and pipe laying this year, I still think wireless and a car battery is the cheapest, easiest and fastest solution.