[boati]

see? just like that, I produced more interesting posts/topics, in 5 minutes, than all of you put together have managed in 5 days.

 

[Garand]

Some of us have been out competing! I've shot 6 matches so far this year and 2 of them were in the US. How many matches have you shot this year Melvin?

 

[John in AR]

I've been fairly busy with real life; haven't been spending as much time lately on "the sidelines" of life - ie, internet forums.

Been researching and experimentng with a new line of alarm panels (Helix) for our business, working on the house project (bent 260 pieces of rebar by myself yesterday), and a couple full days of getting the conex container turned into usable workspace rather than just a giant lockable box. After using the backhoe and a chain to get it leveled out on some timbers, went ahead and built some heavy shelving, a wall-hanging rack for cords & hoses & such, and a heavy work bench in it. Also fitted it out with a smallish 100-watt solar setup to power interior LED lighting, battery chargers, and vent fans for heat reasons. Don't have the fans done yet; the stock vents are too restrictive to permit hardly any airflow, so I'll probably end up cutting in for some small new vents.

Also experimenting with a moderate-priced game-trail camera for remote-site security applications, but after a couple weeks with it have pretty much decided that this is one category where the high-end stuff really is called for.


If I were the pontificating type, I could go into the amp-hour, current-draw, and wire-size calcs for the battery/solar setup, or go into detail on how you level a 40-foot, 9,000-pound box sitting on uneven, uncompacted soil, or how to program supervised Honeywell security devices into a non-Honeywell control panel. But I'm not narcissistic enough to think I'm the only one capable of doing these things.

 

[Terry G]

What Trail Camera's have you tried, John?

 

[Terry G]

see? just like that, I produced more interesting posts/topics, in 5 minutes, than all of you put together have managed in 5 days.

You do stir things up, I'll grant you that. Do you have pictures of your new gear?

 

[John in AR]

What Trail Camera's have you tried, John?

Just one so far. It's a StealthCam brand, don't recall the model. The BIG problem with it is no connectivity - it's not a cellular model, so it's solely dependent on its internal storage. If someone were to find it, they could just take it with them.

I've looked at several of the wireless (cellular) versions and assuming I find the time, I hope to decide on a model and get one coming this week. The bushnell trophy blackout is a real contender, but part of me is wonderng if they're just riding on their name recognition and one of the less-known brands might actually be better..? They do have the true (>900nm) infrared which the stealthcam I've been using doesn't; so that's a definite plus.

A big issue in a lot of the reviews I've read is response time; the time lag between motion in the field of view and the actual capturing of an image. It's weak on the stealthcam and evidently on a lot of trail cameras. Same with interval time between pics - the cellular cams tend to be slow between images due to being busy uploading the previous image to its cloud destination.

If it sounds like I'm rambling, it's because there's so much I just don't know about them yet. The more I read up on them, the more I realize there is to learn.

 

[Terry G]

I have settled on a Moultrie M13015. Pretty basic, but easy to set up and with an 8GB chip it holds a lot of pictures. The night clarity is not great, the daytime is good.

 

[John in AR]

Fwiw, ordered the AT&T-ready version of the HCO Spartan NoGlow. Will pass on a review after playing with it some, but will probably be several weeks.

 

[John in AR]

Pulled pics off the StealthCam from the last couple weeks. Where it's located it gets a lot of grass & weed movement, so it had 3,184 images on it over the course of 12 days. This is from probably 25-30 feet, me walking into the conex container we use for on-site storage. The yellow thing at the top left is the backhoe's front-end loader bucket that I'd been using to lift & level that corner of the conex onto some 6x6 timbers.

The resolution was better on the original - I printed this out but didn't save it to my hard drive (no reason to save it), and so this is actually a picture I took of the printed picture:

Not phenomenal quality, but more than adequate for courtroom purposes; and again, the original was better.

The new camera is supposed to be here this week. After I get some time with it, I'll post some pics and thoughts on it as well.

 

[Terry G]

If your using yours for security purposes you probably need all those shots. I set mine for 1 to five minutes. If I set it for every 10 seconds I get hundreds of pictures of leaves blowing in the wind or Squirrels fighting.