Overview of Equipment used by CaSPIR UK
 

CCTV Cameras

 

 

The CaSPIR founders previously used a DVR Closed Circuit Television System on investigations. The 4 cameras were each attached to 2.4GHz wireless transmitter with a four channel receiver at the PC end.  The cameras have built in IR LED's, see below right

While this works well it comes with a number of disadvantages one of which is that you have to cart around a full blown desktop PC system, even with a flat screen monitor its heavy and of course the screen is fragile.

The largest problem of all is that you have to have a special graphics card in the PC to read the four Audio/Video  connections from the receiver's).

These cards cost around £800 and for that you can nearly buy two reasonable Laptop PC's if your not too fussy.

Carting this around became a pain and eventually we switched to our Laptops and IP cams.

We actually can use four cameras at the same time and in fact we have the capacity to use more if we wish, we actually never got more than three of the wireless DVR cameras working properly at the same time.

Now a recent visit to Maplin rang some bells when we saw a good DVR recorder with a built in hard drive.

So we bought one, shown here with one of our 4 cameras and a transmitter and receiver.

The DVR recorder can handle wired cameras up to 36 metres away, we have tried 18 meters to very good effect at a recent investigation.

 

The DVR can theoretically record from 4 cameras for up to 5 days at the highest possible quality the cameras can muster.

Almost anything that you can do with a video recorder you can do with this really useful piece of kit from the very comprehensive front control panel. see below

If you want to use the control panel, you will need a flat screen monitor or preferably a small flat screen TV with a yellow video in connector.

This can be plugged into the back of the DVR in the handy socket provided.

Also provided is an RJ45 or standard LAN network cable, which is how we use the unit either to set up the cameras via our laptops or to view vi the handy software provided. For those with Vista this all works perfectly from the packet.

If you dont want to spend hours transferring and editing, you can record a section of the video to your Laptop/PC and view it using the MPEG4 player provided.

The picture below shows the PC/Laptop screen as a window, if you choose full screen you just see the 4 images to 1/4 screen each. See below left.

I would personally suggest that if you are looking at this sort of system, visit somewhere like Maplin that has a lot of this sort of gear on show.

Also check out the IP cams, they are more compact and do not need as much hardware.

The only downside is that you do need access to someone who is at least  IT savvy, although these are becoming far less difficult to find these days.

We have not completely thrown out the use of RF transmitters and receivers, but at least we now have a choice.

Not to mention of course the ability to field 8 unmanned cameras in three different areas of a site under investigation.

One last point on the DVR it has one microphone socket, some have two. We will be using this with a wide area boundary microphone somewhere in the middle of our cameras or in one specific area where we want to hear what's going on.

Whoever thought up this device and its software really knew their stuff its all in the box.

 

© County Society for Paranormal Investigation and Research - 2008


Last Updated 27/07/2008