01 June 2018

For more than a decade, Wildlife Windows has specialised in designing and installing multiple camera systems for nature reserve visitor centres and supplying monitoring equipment for conservation professionals and ecological consultants.

With customers including the National Trust, RSPB and several large private companies particularly within construction, the Dorset-based company often has to overcome significant technical challenges to install surveillance systems in hard-to-reach locations with limited power and connectivity.

In many situations, the company turns to technology from Veracity, a manufacturer of IP transmission devices, surveillance storage arrays and integrated command and control systems. 

Although originally working with analogue cameras, in recent years Wildlife Windows has largely switched to IP video and gained many advantages in terms of flexibility and quality. Yet running power and connectivity over longer distances is still tricky. As an example, some years ago a high-profile project helped to protect, relocate and ultimately return nesting peregrine falcons at Battersea Power Station in London. The company needed to install multiple cameras within a complex structure which would have become inaccessible as building work progressed.

The challenge was connecting up to four IP cameras over an existing coax cable across a 400 metre run and, in this instance, Veracity’s HIGHWIRE Powerstar Quadwhich enables the connection of multiple cameras using a single cable, proved vital. The project also benefited from using the vendor’s POINTSOURCEPlus tool for powering PoE IP cameras in-situto complete camera alignment, focus, configuration and test from a locally connected laptop. This also showed the client that the cameras were functioning as expected before the next phase of construction that would make access to the installation almost impossible.

In other instances, the Wildlife Windows team has relied on Veracity’s OUTREACH Maxnetwork extenders to overcome the distance limitations of Ethernet and PoE to deliver projects in hard-to-reach rural locations, including the positioning of fixed cameras above an Osprey nest in Scotland.