Is a CCTV camera on the mast worth the effort or a waste of time?

[markxengineerin]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trrHXlNa59s

There's mine- it's broken about 80% of the time, and useful 20%. If doing it again, which I might, I would mount it on the bow railing, to make it easier to repair, and possibly skip the gimbal. My main use is collision avoidance- often easier to look at the TV screen inside than pop my head out. I want to do automatic obstacle detection + alarm, thermal camera, etc, haven't gotten that far yet.

[fxykty]

We mounted an IP video camera half way up our mast, so it shows the front half of our boat and out to the horizon. The video displays on our chart plotter - can be tiled or full screen. Can also be viewed on the camera’s phone app. I used the instructions posted by ilCignio.

We figured it would be most useful for approaching mooring balls and spotting bombies. It is sort of useful, but looking carefully down at the screen is very distracting. Probably would work better if another person could be dedicated to watching the screen.

All in all for us, it’s a toy, not a useful tool.

But if you have hidden corners it would be really useful to show you what’s there.

[skipperpete]

I use CCTV cameras aboard boats I work on. We had a lot of theft from vacant hardstand and berthed yachts where I was working and to stay in the clear I bought 5 CCTV cameras in Singapore and installed them on boats that had multiple contractors ( and brokers) with access to my customers boats…. Quite a revelation. Movement activated and brilliantly disguised ( way way smaller than dash cams) they introduced a whole new level of accountability. The idea was not to get a conviction, or even expose the thieves, simply to establish my own honesty. Sometimes brokers just hand over the keys to a clients boat if they’re too busy to conduct an inspection…. and then the Steiner’s go missing, raybans too ….and the workers that sub contractors use are often not the guys you want on your boat alone and un watched. You’d be surprised how often plotter chart SD cards are stolen, winch handles, coin jars, electrical components from the spares locker.

[UFO]

I saw a new raymarine system in action - 2 HD cameras, one on either spreader giving a full 180 forward coverage. It also super imposed channel markers and other navigational features and apparently lots more - I only had a brief look at it, but it did look very impressive from what I saw.