Posts made by Fizzball_241945990828201

... for the technically inclined, WiFi stats from the Unify (model UAP-AC-M) to the PT 4K camera... ideally signal strength could be a little better, however I have a few trees impairing line of sight which is probably the issue... still performing at > 70Mbps which is more than adequate for my usage.

....thx for the tips... I actually went to Bunnings and found some 12mm dowel and just padded it with some electrical tape to fit snugly inside the 15mm PVC tube (ideally a 14mm dowel would have been a better option, however my local Bunnings only seemed to jump from 12mm to 19mm); it seems to have added a bit more rigidity. I taped around the top and bottom of the dowel also to give it some water protection. However the sway appears to have had an added advantage in that the horses don't seem to use it as a scratching pole, thus it remains in tact thus far!

I recently cobbled together another using an old aluminium music stand extendable pole - this time with a PT (4K) camera. The pole was 16mm at the bottom and 13mm at the top, so again a bit of padding was necessary, and the 15mm saddles a bit too small. I didn't have anywhere to rest the bottom of the stand, so I just used an L-bracket to give it a base to rest upon. This camera was located out of range of my house WiFi signal, however it was only around 100m away; so rather than use the PT 4G model as I did on the previous one (which was approx. 500m away with no line of sight) I chose to use a Unifi WiFi extender which did the trick. It seemed to save a few hundred dollars with the lower cost PT WiFi only model, and no SIM card fee. The Unify cost around $140.

I have 13 cameras - mainly Argus 2, PT, and PT Go... i still have to run v8.2.6 on MacOS (12.x) as i've found several issues with the later versions, including the Dec 7 release, namely -

1. will not enumerate all cameras upon startup - you have to manually hit 'connect' for each
2. GO (4G) cameras will not display - I've tried to remove and add via UID to no avail. Yet v8.2.6 displays them every time.
3. the enumeration time to display a camera is considerably longer

Thus if you're having odd issues with 8.4.x or 8.5.x on MacOS, i'd give v8.2.6 a try as i've never had an issue with it.

-- Fizz

Here's a cheap pole mount I made for my Go PT 4G using 15mm PVC pipe and some saddle clamps. The PT mounting bracket aligns with the 15mm saddle clip holes so easy to fit with a few screws. I cut some padding strips from the foam packing in the box to allow the saddles to screw on with a snug fit around the PVC pipe. For the solar panel I had to drill an extra hole into the saddle to get 2 holes on the Reolink supplied mount to align before screwing together. Finally I just tidied up the cable with some flex ties. Parts cost around $10 in total. It sways a little in windy conditions, but equivalent steel or copper pipe was around $30 so settled on the cheaper PVC for now.