Quote:
Originally Posted by BeaverIslandGuy
From you and Orion, if I am understanding it correctly, I can plug any USB broadband card directly in to the cradlepoint router and achieve the broadband/WIFI connection? If so, that might work well here. A few questions/comments.
a) does it auto-on when power is applied (useful for a winter connection for a webcam?
b) While I agree the range on the MIFI is not great, and posted as such, one of the advantages of it is size. If I understand the cradlepoint website, even the "travel" modem/router is 9x6.2 and 1.5 lb. (Do I have that right?) While this might work here as a fixed point, not sure it fits my definition of a travel size device. As I stated, one of the reasons I thought the MIFI was slick was its 3.5"x2"x.25" size. Much closer to my definition.
Do I have the size of the cradlepoint devices right? Do they make a true "travel" version that I just have not found?
c) Imbedded broadband cards. My brother was using one last year, which is what led us to look for the zboost solution. Head to head, his range (HP laptop - verizon broadband) was much less (and slower) than mine.
thanks - will keep all posted as the experiment continues.
Slickcraft. Thanks for the data usage figure. Do you have a webcam running?
IG or one of the other webcam guru's out there - what would you estimate your data upload is per month, what would a typical pic file size be, and how often are you transmitting? Thanks in advance.
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Yes, it is auto power-on, and uses minimal (about 5W) power draw.
One thing to keep in mind when using any of these devices to power a webcam is that the wireless provider generally does not like you doing this, you may find that incoming connections to the camera are mysteriously blocked at times. Outgoing connections (such as if your camera can upload a picture at specified intervals) generally works fine though.
The cradlepoint travel routers and the Mifi are about the same size. I travel with mine almost every week, it certainly fits my definition of portable. The one I use, CTR-350 (
http://cradlepoint.com/products/ctr3...oadband-router) , is about the size and weight of a deck of playing cards. I've used it several times to connect to remote cameras, and also to put up an ad-hoc camera that remote people can connect to.
Webcams have different streaming rates and image sizes. A camera with a D1 imager will stream at about 56-200Kbps, depending on frames-per-second and compression settings. A camera that supports H.264 streaming will use far less bandwidth than the older stuff using MJPEG. An image snapshot should be very small, 20-30KB in most cases. My camera sends a 7 second video clip when there is an event, and those clips average about 180KB in size.
Mega-pixel cameras will use a lot more bandwidth, and most have poor low-light performance as well, so be careful what you go with.