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?

 

[Andy]

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

 

[jake of center]

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

 

[Dan Major]

rickj123456789@yahoo.com wrote in news:1122871981.541797.315760
@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com:

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?

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 ?).

 

[grunt]

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

 

grunt wrote:

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

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