Parks and Rec Project: No Network? No Power? No problem.

By Neal Bellamy, IT Director at Kenton Brothers

Challenging installs are our specialty.

We love a good challenge, and love creating the right solution to meet the need. The latest challenge comes in the way of no network, lots of trees, and in some places… no power.

A local county Parks and Recreation group came to us with several places they wanted to have cameras. They have an existing Milestone commercial video surveillance system in the county, but it was not integrated with their parks and rec department. The team wanted to cover marinas, several park shelters around lakes, and a few trailheads that had no power. The final goal was to integrate everything into the Milestone platform so there is more visibility.

Remote Locations

The first challenge is how remote some of the locations are. An internet connection was available in 8 of the 30+ locations they wanted cameras, but the internet connections were not very strong or fast. We need to make sure the cameras are recording reliably, so we placed servers at the 8 locations as centralized storage spots for the cameras around each area. In one instance, we installed a server at the marina.

No Local Area Network (LAN)

The second challenge is that there is no network at several of the shelters where the department wanted cameras. Of course, wireless radios are nothing new, but we have lots of trees in the way. We had to get pretty creative to make a path from the cameras back to the marina, with line of sight for the radios and the least number of “hops”. There were several times we had to direct the signal away from the marina so that we could collect many signals in one place, and then send it all back to be recorded on the marina server.

No Power

No network is for sure a challenge. But the hardest challenge can be no power. We had to move  to a solar solution to power the cameras.

It’s always fun to overcome technical challenges. Projects like these are memorable and satisfying. Do you have an interesting situation to deal with as you consider improving your commercial security posture? We’ve dealth with literally hundreds, and if you have something new, we would love to tackle it with you. Please give us a call.