We started up a quarterly mile shoot here at our range a few years ago, and quickly determined that a normal spotting scope setup was not working well. Spotting misses was ok, but hits on the plate, and misses that were in the shadow's of the target were not possible to see. So I built a target camera system.
I built the system around the 900mhz frequency, with the thought that it would be more robust than the 2.4ghz wireless TX that are available. (I have since built a 2nd system on the 2.4ghz system, and it works well too)
The system consists of a Camera, wireless TX and antenna at the target end, and a wireless RX, antenna and TV on the shooters end. The system needed to be battery powered at the target end, as there is no power close to the target. The shooting end also needed to be battery powered as we are moving from firing position to firing position. And we wanted it to be able to be mobile away from the range, as we do off site long range shooting, and might one day carry it into the field for one of those events as well.
One of the requirements of the system would be that it be able to run for up to 6 hours or more on a charge, as the shooting starts early in the day, and sometimes we don't finish until 3pm or so in the afternoon.
The heart of the system is the battery... I went with a 35ah SLA battery... the load of the camera and TX is very low, and I can get over 30 hours, hot or cold... this gives us some margin of error if someone forgets to put the battery on the charger after a match... as we can go multiple matches on one charge.
The TX/RX is a 1.5watt 900mhz 4 ch A/V setup... from here. Long Range 900 MHz 1.5 Watt Video Audio Transmitter and Receiver
The omni antenna's are crap, so I super sized them... literally, I found some 14dB gain yagi antenna's from L-Com...900 MHz 14 dBi Al Yagi Antenna N Female Connector - HG914YE-NF.
2 of these with cabling as well with the correct ends to go from the Tx/Rx connectors to the N-Type connector on the antenna. The N-Type is a large robust connector, easy to use in the field... the SMA connector on the TX/RX is not. I got a 50' cable for the TX end and a 25' cable for the RX end. The 50' allows us to place the antenna well out of the flight path of the bullets, and the 25' allows me to get away from the truck at the RX end and maximize the signal.
You can make adaptors to run everything at 12v, but I just got a couple of 400watt inverters and hooked them up to the battery and used the AC cords provided by the parts... made it simple and it gives us a power source in the field if needed.
The battery charger is a battery tender junior... plug it in and forget it... it float charges after a reaching full charge and can be left on for a month or so at a time...
This is all mounted in box on the TX end, Battery/TX/ and storage for the wind flag, tripod, camera and cabling.
For the camera I stumbled across something quite by accident, and it worked so well, we stayed with it. I was looking for a camera to put on the system, various security cameras, etc... for proof of concept, I grabbed an old Hi8 camcorder I had laying around and went to the range... hooked up the video AND audio and tried it out. At the first shoot we used this, the tape would only record for 2 hours before shutting off... and then you had to rewind it and hit record again... the camera would shut off after a few minutes if you didn't hit record.
What we found was that the audio from the camera provided us with instant feedback for confirming a hit, once you have a lot of hits on the plate, seeing a new hit get's hard, but the sound of the gong ringing is very distinctive and we could also hear misses and when we hit the stand the gong was hanging on... it worked so well, that I went and found a cheap video camera that records to a flash drive, and will stay on forever even when not recording to use as the system camera...
We place some steel plates in front of the camera and battery box to protect from stray rounds...
And here is the complete setup at the target end...
At the RX end, or the shooting end of the game, I found a 19" LCD TV at a thrift store for $10... got another 400w AC inverter, and that powers the RX/TV system in the truck. We just run it off the truck battery, we didn't get another battery for the RX end, although we could have, figure we would have a auto of some sort, so why bother.
The antenna mast's are left over dish mounted mast's... you can use anything, but the antenna's do need to be in the air around 4 to 6'.
We use this system 4 times a year, and it works great. We know without a doubt when we have hit's on target, and can usually walk someone in to the target with a spotting scope and TV working together... we zoom in fairly tight on the target with about 10 feet or so of ground around the target. Because of the angle of the ground, the camera is lower than the target and the top of the target in the camera is just sky, so we put that at the tope of the camera and just show the ground to the side and below the target.
The range of this setup is impressive, to date, the farthest we have gone is 2640 yards, or 1.5 miles... with no problem or sign of the signal going away. I think I can probably get to 5 miles or more... but realistically we will probably quit at 2miles unless we get some artillery.
All said and done, we are into our target system for around $700, I can do it for less now, and instead of the 4' Yagi's I now know I can do it with 2.4ghz and much smaller yagi antenna's which make for a little more portable setup.
I built the system around the 900mhz frequency, with the thought that it would be more robust than the 2.4ghz wireless TX that are available. (I have since built a 2nd system on the 2.4ghz system, and it works well too)
The system consists of a Camera, wireless TX and antenna at the target end, and a wireless RX, antenna and TV on the shooters end. The system needed to be battery powered at the target end, as there is no power close to the target. The shooting end also needed to be battery powered as we are moving from firing position to firing position. And we wanted it to be able to be mobile away from the range, as we do off site long range shooting, and might one day carry it into the field for one of those events as well.
One of the requirements of the system would be that it be able to run for up to 6 hours or more on a charge, as the shooting starts early in the day, and sometimes we don't finish until 3pm or so in the afternoon.
The heart of the system is the battery... I went with a 35ah SLA battery... the load of the camera and TX is very low, and I can get over 30 hours, hot or cold... this gives us some margin of error if someone forgets to put the battery on the charger after a match... as we can go multiple matches on one charge.
The TX/RX is a 1.5watt 900mhz 4 ch A/V setup... from here. Long Range 900 MHz 1.5 Watt Video Audio Transmitter and Receiver
The omni antenna's are crap, so I super sized them... literally, I found some 14dB gain yagi antenna's from L-Com...900 MHz 14 dBi Al Yagi Antenna N Female Connector - HG914YE-NF.
2 of these with cabling as well with the correct ends to go from the Tx/Rx connectors to the N-Type connector on the antenna. The N-Type is a large robust connector, easy to use in the field... the SMA connector on the TX/RX is not. I got a 50' cable for the TX end and a 25' cable for the RX end. The 50' allows us to place the antenna well out of the flight path of the bullets, and the 25' allows me to get away from the truck at the RX end and maximize the signal.
You can make adaptors to run everything at 12v, but I just got a couple of 400watt inverters and hooked them up to the battery and used the AC cords provided by the parts... made it simple and it gives us a power source in the field if needed.
The battery charger is a battery tender junior... plug it in and forget it... it float charges after a reaching full charge and can be left on for a month or so at a time...
This is all mounted in box on the TX end, Battery/TX/ and storage for the wind flag, tripod, camera and cabling.
For the camera I stumbled across something quite by accident, and it worked so well, we stayed with it. I was looking for a camera to put on the system, various security cameras, etc... for proof of concept, I grabbed an old Hi8 camcorder I had laying around and went to the range... hooked up the video AND audio and tried it out. At the first shoot we used this, the tape would only record for 2 hours before shutting off... and then you had to rewind it and hit record again... the camera would shut off after a few minutes if you didn't hit record.
What we found was that the audio from the camera provided us with instant feedback for confirming a hit, once you have a lot of hits on the plate, seeing a new hit get's hard, but the sound of the gong ringing is very distinctive and we could also hear misses and when we hit the stand the gong was hanging on... it worked so well, that I went and found a cheap video camera that records to a flash drive, and will stay on forever even when not recording to use as the system camera...
We place some steel plates in front of the camera and battery box to protect from stray rounds...
And here is the complete setup at the target end...
At the RX end, or the shooting end of the game, I found a 19" LCD TV at a thrift store for $10... got another 400w AC inverter, and that powers the RX/TV system in the truck. We just run it off the truck battery, we didn't get another battery for the RX end, although we could have, figure we would have a auto of some sort, so why bother.
The antenna mast's are left over dish mounted mast's... you can use anything, but the antenna's do need to be in the air around 4 to 6'.
We use this system 4 times a year, and it works great. We know without a doubt when we have hit's on target, and can usually walk someone in to the target with a spotting scope and TV working together... we zoom in fairly tight on the target with about 10 feet or so of ground around the target. Because of the angle of the ground, the camera is lower than the target and the top of the target in the camera is just sky, so we put that at the tope of the camera and just show the ground to the side and below the target.
The range of this setup is impressive, to date, the farthest we have gone is 2640 yards, or 1.5 miles... with no problem or sign of the signal going away. I think I can probably get to 5 miles or more... but realistically we will probably quit at 2miles unless we get some artillery.
All said and done, we are into our target system for around $700, I can do it for less now, and instead of the 4' Yagi's I now know I can do it with 2.4ghz and much smaller yagi antenna's which make for a little more portable setup.
