Camera and webcam page technical details:

My camera is an Astak CM-906D wireless color camera, with night vision and weather resistant features, and Astak's model 707 4-channel receiver. Although wireless, this camera requires an A/C (not batteries) power source. My experience with this camera is good, not fantastic. The wireless reception from outdoors to the PC is not as good as, say, a 2.4 gHz cordless telephone handset. The A/C adapter is very bulky, with a 6-foot cord that is too short to reach an outlet from any useful camera location, and the connection to an extension cord is difficult to protect from moisture. The camera works OK in sub-freezing weather and has been running almost non-stop since August, 2006. The camera was jerry-rigged to a metal pole as shown, but today it is jerry-rigged to a folded piece of sheet metal and hung from a shutter (similar to the shutter seen behind the camera in the photo). The thin power cord fits into the window frame and the window can be closed, and the A/C adpater is now plugged in, inside, without an extension cord.

The camera (whether outside or inside) transmits to the receiver (inside), and the receiver uses RCA jacks to connect to a Leadtek WinFast PVR2000 video capture card. The PVR2000 setup process was not simple, and an adapter cable is required because the Leadtek card has only an S-video jack, so my Leadtek experience has been good, not fantastic. The overall video system cost (camera, capture card, and associated extras) was about $300 US.

The PC runs Windows XP Pro, with Dorgem open-source webcam capture software. Dorgem is nice for the (free) price. The images are uploaded to my remote web host (HosTek). A new image is captured each minute, overwriting the image from that time on the previous day. Because the webcam PC and the remote server are different computers in different time zones, you might not see what you think should be a current image.