The use of CCTV to combat crime and vandalism is now widespread. Here, Bob Drewery looks at the use of the latest anti-vibration and shock mounting technology available for mounting CCTV.

Over many years CCTV usage has increased in car parks, rail platforms and other public areas to combat crime and vandalism. Inevitably we have seen a desire to migrate the technology onto public transport vehicles.
Various systems have been brought to market with varying degrees of operational and commercial success. Success hinges on survivability in the unique operating environment of vehicles.
Until recently most CCTV recording was onto analogue videotape. This is low cost media but carries substantial overhead of tape storage and management. Without disciplined regular maintenance, stock rotation and replacement, poor quality playback is often experienced at the crucial moment.
Next came DV digital video tape. This is more expensive media producing much better images, but still presents the problem of tape management and storage.
DVD and CD-ROM offer excellent recording quality but do not yet have sufficient capacity for the recording times required in the mobile market.
With the boom in PC technology, ever increasing hard-disk capacities in smaller and smaller packages, PC based digital recorders appeared and became a viable alternative to time-lapse VCRs. In the early days, there were some serious questions about data integrity which presented many obstacles to acceptance of digital video for evidential purposes.
These obstacles have been overcome by the introduction of tamperproof proprietary contiguous file formats incorporating time/date tagging or watermarking of individual images.

The mobile environment

Vehicles, and particularly trains, present many environmental problems. Constantly variable heat and humidity, irregular shock and vibration, unstable power supply to name a few.
Also, the equipment must not cause electro-magnetic interference with other vehicle systems or be itself susceptible. Equipment superficially adapted from general CCTV or PC markets invariably suffer reliability problems with typically up to a 30 per cent failure rate.
The answer is to design recorders from the start for the environment but early systems designed for vehicles were over-engineered, bulky and expensive.
RP Sicherheitssysteme GmbH uses patented anti-vibration and shock mounting technology, Figs. 1 and 2, and so enjoy a failure rate of less than 5 per cent.
Consequently they are able to offer a five year warranty on their recorders with three years on Hard Disks (two years more than the HD manufacturer).
RP's RoadRunner range includes recently launched one, two and four-camera recorders to add to their existing eight camera units all designed specifically for the mobile environment. Recorder units for up to 12 cameras and 50 fps are also shortly to be launched.

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Bob Drewery is UK Branch Manager for RP Sicherheitssysteme GmbH, Flensburg, Germany. www.rp-security.com