BATC Forum

Are we making things to expensive and complicated by adopting DVB/T or DVB/S formats?
The CCTV industry has gone from analogue wireless cameras to digital wireless by adopting IP technology.
Very cheap equipment is now available to create a wireless IP link and cameras with an IP stream output are nearly as cheap as analogue ones, even analogue cameras can be used with a plug in hardware codec.
Mixtures of Mpeg2 Mpeg4 H264 and Mjpeg compression cause no problem even HD IP cameras in 16 x 9 can use the same link.
Most streams can be viewed using explorer with the appropriate active x plug in.
Should we be modifying wireless access equipment for higher power output on amateur only frequencies to create links and networks for ATV use?

John G0ATW.

Hi John...
It's been documented a little in CQ-TV before about the use of video over IP idea and is very good but needs a source of equipment.... current equipment is very expensive and hard to get..

I have played with an ATV repeater idea via a Wi-Fi network and is possible to do but the problem comes when specifying a specific frequency to use, these wifi adaptors are hard to mod frequency wise and the ic's are so small to start with.... to make something that was probably withing the licence this is what i used:

I used a band pass filter on 2.412MHz center on the antenna port of the router for tests to block the frequency hopping rf from getting to the antenna, after the filter was a 1W wifi booster to give better coverage.
A pc was connected to the router via wired lan and acted as the video server running VLC (videolan) this had input port numbers setup for different users to stream audio/video into. VLC was made to output the input video into a quad screen mosaic and re-send it back out on another port number in multicast mode.
the wifi network was unsecure to keep the data rate up... At this time i was using a 11Mbit router for the project, i now have a 108Mbt one to test with sometime.
Let me know if you are interested.. i have the vlc config files somewhere on my pc for the server side of things to get you started!
Just use a minidish with a wifi dongle at the focal point and an extension usb lead for accessing on a very basic setup?

I've seen the wireless cameras from maplin that use GMSK modulation but the resolution on them from the reviews is very poor..probably less than 1Mbit data rate... anyone going to pay £90 to buy one to test and let us know? i would be interested

Has anyone got any other sources of these digital wireless cameras?

Rob
M0DTS