I plan to do exactly this on my new tower. I shopped for cameras for quite
a while and ended up buying the Toshiba IK-WB15A (and older IK-WB11A - no
optical zoom or PoE) for another installation I had. You can find specs on
Toshiba's website at
http://www.toshibasecurity.com/products/prod_camera_detail_ikwb15a.jsp.
It has 4 times the resolution of the best NTSC video camera and amazing
night vision (better than me) even when it looks into a light source. The
webcam below has a good image and the Toshiba is similar. It's hard for me
to gauge because most of mine are looking into buildings and I have one
looking across a parking lot - not nearly the detailed scenery of the camera
below. I am amazed at how well I can read things through the camera.
The camera has a web interface to configure everything and can dump images
to an internal card or FTP server. With the Power over Ethernet, you only
need to run a (shielded) CAT5 cable up the tower. Since you can steer the
camera over a broad range, you won't have to rotate the antennas to look a
different direction (unless you want 360 degrees).
I can send sample day/night images if you're interested. They won't be as
beautiful as the snow-covered Portland harbor :-).
Scott N7SS
-----Original Message-----
From: towertalk-bounces@contesting.com
[mailto:towertalk-bounces@contesting.com] On Behalf Of David Gilbert
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 8:59 AM
To: Eric Hilding; TowerTalk
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Maine Weather (WEBCAM)
Thanks for researching that. I'm in the process of putting up a tower
with a couple of HF yagis on it (finished digging the hole yesterday),
and I've been thinking of mounting a webcam on the underside of the boom
of the lower yagi. I think it would be pretty cool if more hams did
that, and in my case it would double as a security camera since I'm
running extra cables (power and coax) for it in the trench back to the
shack.
That particular camera is pretty pricey but the picture quality is
awesome. Anyone know of a better alternative?
Hopefully this isn't off-topic since I plan to mate it with the tower
and antenna.
73,
Dave AB7E
Eric Hilding wrote:
>
>> http://www.autoeurope.com/harborcam.cfm
>>
>
>
> I just clicked on the harborcam and saw a picture perfect postcard view
with
> blue sunny skies. The only snow was on the ground. 9:53:24 AM EST was
the
> pix time today (1/15/08).
>
> Thoroughly impressed with the quality of the harborcam pix, I called Auto
> Europe and an extremely helpful YL named 'Teal' got me a model number for
> this harborcam located on the top of the building. It's a Toshiba
IK-WB15A,
> and as I suspected, checking Google yielded prices over $600. I'm still
> putting one in my Christmas Wish List letter to Santa this year J
>
>
>
> 73.
>
>
>
> Rick, K6VVA
>
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