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Wireless camera question

Hi, im building a bottom crawling rov (archimedes screw type) to explore a local lake and am stumped as to possible video feeds, I have the circuts and parts list all set for the body and controls done and i've done research on usb cameras and the cable lenth has severe limitations, 10 feet unboosted you can buy boosters for usbs but they are very expensive. As an inexpensive alternative to usb webcams I was considering an x10 wireless camera and since wireless can't penetrate water I was thinking of running an ariel wire right down into the container for the x10, would this work with a 100 feet of ariel?

Reply to
rickj123456789
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Andy replies: Wireless CAN penetrate water --- only not very far... The signal doesn't disappear, it is only attenuated.... The X10 only goes about 100 feet or so in air, so I think that would probably not work very well thru

100 feet of water --- not enough power....

The X10 uses, I think , 2.4 Ghz for a link. True, this is not very good for propagating in water. Perhaps a simple loop which is taped to the antenna on a coax which goes to the surface with another loop taped to the receiver might provide enough pickup. It ain't elegant, but I bet you might get enough signal to work, and it isn't difficult to test at all in open air......

As far as direct connection to the 2.4 GHZ antenna feed, ..... well, if you are familiar with RF you can probably get away with it, and 100 feet of coax will give less attenuation than radiation over 100 feet of distance with the dinky antennae they use. If you aren't comfortable with RF, try the loop on each end of 100 feet of coax that I suggested above, It might work, but if it doesn't , you haven't wasted very much time......

Andy

Reply to
Andy

use coax, cheap reliable, less complex, great signal. Clear winner

Reply to
jake of center

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in news:1122871981.541797.315760 @g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

Severaly years back, I was looking for a camera for a safety back-up monitor for a large truck. I found a "ball" camera that used regular cat5 cable. I didn't use it on the truck, but made my own pan/tilt system using the same hookup, plus some of the unused leads of the cat5 cable for the pan/tilt. I've run over 200' over this unshielded twisted-pair cable. The camera is not usb, it's baseband video however. I think you can run even further with twisted-pair (100m ?).

Reply to
Dan Major

I see two approaches. Autonomous system (robot) with digital video recorder. Dangling an analog (NTSC) camera by a video / power cable.

Reply to
grunt

I think this is probably the way to go, checking on cameras now probably some form of older model vhs vid recorder. Thanks all.

Reply to
rickj123456789

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