Wireless surveillance equipment is becoming somewhat more common, however it is still not quite ready to overtake wired cctv products. Let’s go over a few of the drawbacks and solutions to wireless surveillance.
You Need Power
A majority of consumers when they think about buying wireless surveillance equipment, they tend to forget that you will still need a power source at the camera and at the receiver. This alone leads some to believe that wireless equipment is thus pointless; however this is not really true as wireless equipment still provides the benefit of not having to run a long video cables between your camera and recording equipment.
For those who find it useless to have to have power at the camera end, when there may not be a power source available, there is a possible solution. The solution I’m talking about is the use of battery packs.
Battery packs are available on the marketplace that can provide temporary power for your surveillance equipment. The drawbacks to these battery packs are their limited time in which they can be used. If you only need the power to be maintained for a matter of hours, then a battery pack may be a good solution for your application. If you need the power to last longer than this however, than you will need to find a larger power source such as a car battery with power conversion adapters, or you may need to use something even more permanent such as a small generator.
Of course at this point if none of these power options are feasible, then you may have to run a power and video cable after all, and negate the use of wireless technology all together.
Interference
In the past, a big deterrent to using wireless surveillance equipment was the potential for interference from other wireless devices. As analog is now being replaced with digital wireless technologies this problem is quickly subsiding. The partial problem that still exists however is the number of channels you can fit on a frequency. Many of the digital wireless technologies have a channel cap of some sort, and if you need more cameras than this will allow, you may still have to resort to a wired solution. Additionally if you have anyone nearby using the same type of equipment as you, then this will reduce the number of channels you are able to use even further.
In the end, wireless surveillance equipment and cctv products can provide a nice alternative for smaller home and business based systems, but as the systems get larger and more complex the harder it is to use them.
Christian M Gillman has worked in the surveillance industry for over 7 years. Subscribe to our monthly newsletter, learn more about surveillance, and find great products at http://www.cu1.com
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