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I  have a couple of these type of discussions per week and sometimes they help, but often the possibilities overwhelm people and they stop listening to what I’m saying and let their imaginations run wild.  Just because laser microphones exist doesn’t mean that someone went out and spent thousands of dollars on one to hear your everyday conversations.  Just because devices that will emulate cell phone towers and knock out encryption exist doesn’t mean that someone spent tens of thousands of dollars and is risking serious jail time to hear your calls.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel like things are coming at you from all directions and that the person you think might be responsible for doing surveillance on you would go to any lengths to do so. But there are some basic common sense questions you can ask yourself that will help you slow down and see things a bit more rationally.

The first and most important question to ask is, does the person I think is doing surveillance on me have a financial interest in doing so? If the answer is no, then in a good majority of cases you can stop worrying right there. The fact is most people are not willing to throw lots of money into surveillance equipment to keep tabs on your day to day life unless there is a promise of significant financial return in doing so.

The second and third questions after you eliminate a financial motivation are who and why? If you can’t answer these questions with a clear answer right away, chances are you can stop right there.  Random strangers or neighbors that you have little or no interaction with generally aren’t going to pick you and make your life miserable for no good reason.

The reality is that outside of corporate espionage and perhaps some divorce cases where there is a lot of money at stake, most situations where someone may be doing surveillance on you can be handled with common sense, keeping a level head,  and some basic methods of counter-surveillance like a Radio Frequency Detector, our basic camera finders and very thorough physical inspection.

If you would like to know more about this subject, please feel free to stop by any of our stores for a demonstration of any of our basic counter-surveillance  equipment. You can find our basic counter-surveillance equipment here on our website.

Now, let put this in a particle scenario.

Lets say you have a storage shed in your back yard. You might keep all you lawn care products, Pool equipment,  Automotive parts and tools, or anything of value that can not be stored in the house. How do you protect them without spending an arm and a leg especially if the shed is not connected to the house nor does it have any power. The solution above is perfect because you can mount the motion sensor on the shed,  the siren on the back side of the house and you can put the Receiver / Base Station in the house close to a window that faces the back yard. That way the signal from the motion sensor will reach the Receiver / Base Station also you will not have to bury any cable from the Receiver / Base Station to the siren. Making it very difficult for someone to defeat the system.  You can get this entire system for around $200.00 making it a very economical solution.

For more information on this just give any of us a buzz or post in our forums.

S. Sutherland

This pen is a larger pen like a Montblanc pen its a bit taller than its predecessors by maybe a half an inch or so, it feels solid and its got some good weight to it, so yes it can double as a paper holder on a windy day. Not a whole lot has changed as far as use time goes,  it still only runs for about 60 minutes on a  full charge, upside is a full charge only takes 45 minutes now as opposed to 2 hours.

Some other neat features of this unit are as follows:

• 1280 x 960 record resolution at 30fps
• 2 mega pixel portable camera future along with web cam functions
• Audio detection recording
• Can store 30,000 images
• You can charge the unit while recording

So I tested all three functions of this pen starting with the video.  It was straight forward, click the button once on the top of the pen and it turns on the unit, click it one more time and the blue light begins to flash and your recording video.  Playback was just as easy, plug it into the USB port with the provided USB cable and download it, no software required, video was clean and the audio was surprisingly better than I would imagine giving that the older models where nothing to get excited about audio wise.

The second function I chose to test was the the cameras snapshot ability.  Now I am happy they added this feature to the pen because I get a lot of customers who have asked for this. The camera is 2 mega pixels so nothing super hi-res, the picture quality was decent, but for those spies who want to be able to read letters on 8 x 11 in Times New Roman 10 you  will be sadly disappointed.  Once again super easy to download to the PC.

Lastly I tried out the audio detection recording function otherwise know as voice activation but I like to fondly refer to it as noise activation. That’s exactly what it did any noise it heard it woke up and recorded the video footage, I was surprised by how well it worked, I didnt have much faith in it and honestly its not exactly built for this function, although neat its still a pen with very limited battery life, ya you may say toss it on the table and let it go, sure do that and get that fantastic sideways shot you always dreamt of along with half the table blocking out the picture.

Now the real cool part of this unit is that you can record with it while its plugged in charging, none of the other pens we carried previously could boast such a feature, yes I know its still limits you but hey its a step in the right direction, use your imagination or find a neighbor hood kid and use his!!!! Still though that’s very cool it allows a new user of this device to plug it in and get the hang of it before heading to his or hers appointment.

Now I know most video pens have the time and date stamp function but some of them are very difficult to set, I found this to be one of the easiest to use, there is a software disk that comes with the unit on the disk it has the date and time setup file already saved on it, all you have to do is set your date and time save the file then plug in your pen and load the date and time file right on the pen and your done.

Overall I was happy with this pens performance. I liked the new hi-res at 30fps and the ability to take snap shots, I felt the pen was pretty simple to operate, I was disappointed that this pen was a bit larger in length than its cousins, I do also like that the button is flush along the top of the pen instead of sticking out like the older pens do. Its a meatier pen than some of the previous pens and its a bit weighty which could cause problems when placing it in a shirt pocket, super easy to use though and in the end thats the most important feature of all.  I would not shy away from using this pen.

SCS4

Let’s start with Enterprise and Desk-top class hard drives.  We have many customers who often have some spare hard drive laying around their home and want to put it to use.  So when they come in to one of our stores to purchase a shiny new  recorder for their home surveillance system, we offer them 3 choices in terms of hard drive capacity.

“But what about that hard drive I have at home, can’t I just use that one?”

So we ask a few simple questions of our own.  Do you have the model number so I can see if the compatibility list has it on there?  What size hard drive is it?  Is it IDE or Sata? What usually follows after we ask is…

“So what hard drive sizes do I get to choose from?”

We use Enterprise class hard drives for our DVR’s they are designed to be running 24/7 and to be written too far more often than a home PC.  They also have a higher heat tolerance and it’s faster to access data from them.  They may be a bit more costly over a PC hard drive but remember, they each serve different purposes.  Having a more sturdy storage disk that is designed to reduce and/or correct its own internal disk errors,  is by far what you’d want in terms of what to store your video on.

A home PC hard drive is designed to run 8hrs a day 5 days a week.  When you keep to these basics you can get  longevity out of it.  However if it is not your recorder for your camera system, there’s not really a big need to rush out and get an Enterprise class drive for it.

When it comes to storage for your Digital Video Recorder, stick to what’s best and been tested for the one you choose.   Avoid just tossing any spare components into a piece of equipment that you intend to rely on for home protection.  The extra coin you spend on something like this may one day be well worth it.

B. Eaton

The menu’s are relatively simple and even show you how much record time you will get depending on your resolution settings and SD card size.  You can playback video from the unit, limit the size of each record file and even do motion only recording.

With the simplicity of the menu interface and player software, we sell lot’s of these units as do-it-yourself nanny camera systems.  Just choose your camera, add a battery pack and a little bit of creativity and you have your new low cost mini camera and recorder setup.

The unit can support up to an 8GB SD card so you are looking at a math quiz, 100 min to over 2,000 minutes of recording.   Now, the player software is necessary to play back the video on a computer and is Vista compatible.  Hopefully by next week, I’ll be able to report on if it works with Windows 7.  We already have dozens of these units in the field and working extremely well, they have been fitting quite a few situations where getting power to a larger full size system would’ve been a challenge.

Now to top it all off, this handy little recorder has a remote control and uses just a few colored lights on the side, to let you know what mode it is in.  Such as stand-by or recoding or Stopped.  Also on top of that, it has a record default once its not in the menu.  Whatever you set it on, whether motion or continuous, once you exit the menu it will go to record mode automatically.  Forgetting to hit the record button happens more often than people would care to admit, so this unit will do it for you.

So what else could there be that could top, its size, default recording, having a remote control, motion recording, battery pack operated and can support an 8GB SD card? Well, it would be the fact that we have them available once again. Take a look at it here.

SCS4/B. Eaton

The software also works independently from the DVR itself.  You can configure settings remotely but they only affect the computer that’s being used to view and record the video and not the DVR itself.  We found this to be very handy and a really nice way of not accidentally changing settings in the DVR.

During our testing of the CMS we also liked the quick record from a live view mode.  Just a simple button of start and stop and you can record a bit of what you see live.   The address book was easy enough to populate with IP addresses and you can log into 2 different locations as once.  They are separated by tabs and all you have to do is tab from one to the next.

Now of course the one thing that is most important to anyone in this business is .. “will it convert to an AVi file?” .. and yes, yes it will.  In the software in one of the video playback menu’s there is a convert to AVI function.  Very handy.

B. Eaton

The unit is small, at an inch and a half on each side (the smallest I’ve ever seen). It uses motion activation to conserve the built-in rechargeable battery and can store up to 120 hours of vehicle data. There is only one button on the unit and 2 lights to indicate the battery life and activity signal.

Using the tracker was pretty straightforward; run the software, charge up the unit, put it on the vehicle, and then connect it to your computer and see where the tracker went using Google Earth or Google Maps. You can generate full reports complete with latitude and longitude as well as addresses and idle times.

The iTrail is a simple tracker to use and it has a great battery life considering how small it is. The unit can easily be placed in a vehicle or can even be carried in a pocket and not be noticeable. If monthly fees and live tracking aren’t your thing, I’d highly recommend an iTrail.

Give any of our sales people a call or email if you have any questions. Also, feel free to visit our forums at the following link if you have any questions you would like to ask.

www.spycentresecurityforums.com

Allen at SCS3

Some of the problem is the result of old security systems that needed to be upgraded years ago but are still in use today. If you’re still using a time lapse VCR and a multi-plexor, this means you. But more often the problem would have been avoided if the person buying the security system had just asked a few more questions. The thing is, unless you’re an expert and do a lot of research, it’s hard to know what questions to ask, right?

The thing about buying a security camera system is that much like buying a car, unless you have an unlimited budget, there are a lot of tradeoffs when making a decision about which product will fit your needs best.  What features and benefits are important to you and how much are you willing to pay for them? Are you looking for cameras that you will identify people from, or ones that will give you general coverage so you can see what’s going on across the whole parking lot? Are you looking for the best quality image you can possibly get and have less recording time, or do you want to sacrifice some image quality in order to be able to go back 2 weeks into the recordings and see what happened? Are you willing to spend enough money to be able to have all of the above if those factors are equally important to you?

It’s a lot easier with a car because most people at least know what kind of quality to expect with the different brands available. When you’re car shopping, even a person that’s never done it before knows that when you have a Toyota Camry budget, you’re not going to get a Ferrari. But without the same type of basis for comparison on security cameras, it’s much harder on the average person to go through the process of buying a CCTV system and wind up getting good value for your money as well as a system that meets all your needs.

Instead of telling you about it though, let me show you an example of what I’m talking about. The image below was taken from a live feed from a DVR in our Dallas store.  I set this shot up particularly to illustrate the point that not all cameras are created equally. If you have a camera in a position where the shot is heavily backlit like it is in this shot, which camera would you rather have? (Note: This is a common scenario for cameras in a lobby entryway, warehouse docking areas, multi-windowed rooms, garages or outdoor shots facing the sun). Camera 3 is our entry level infrared camera for $79.99.  Camera #2 is a more advanced infrared camera with varifocal ability for $149.99. Camera #1 is our Wide Dynamic Range camera with a 2.8-12 millimeter lens that would cost you $369 and give you over two times the range as camera #2.  The answer to which you’d want is pretty clear if price is no object. However, it can be quite difficult to prioritize what features are the most important to you when you know your budget won’t allow you the best of all worlds.

Are all cameras created equally?

Ultimately the point of a CCTV security system is in your hands. When you’re buying one, you need to ask yourself important questions like what is most important to me? Catching something after the fact? Deterring it from ever happening? To be able to identify someone from the camera recordings?  To save yourself from legal issues and limit your liability?  These can all be important, but sometimes the tradeoffs I’m talking about will force you to choose which is most important.  If you’re not a CCTV expert, don’t worry.  We are.  Come to us to help us ask the right questions and determine what your needs are, so you can find a system within your budget, but also one that will accomplish your goals.