Well, its gonna be a long weekend at the Beta Site, thats pretty much a guarantee.

As you know, I installed some new cameras up at the Beta Site, but I left the old ones in place as well. More is gooder, right? So last time I was up there I did my usual circuit of taking out batteries and SD cards, downloading the SD cards to my laptop, and then replacing the cards and batteries.

Other than the usual stuff on the cameras were two episodes of intruders. One was my neighbor who lives kittycorner from me. He apparently came up the driveway and then left two minutes later. Later that day a white Dodge Ram came up, and then two minutes later it left. I didn’t spend all that money to not have privacy. Need to fix that.

What does that fix look like? Well, it looks like a 14′ panel gate from Murdochs. Trouble is,m the gate is dang near the length of my little pickup. So, I bribed a guy from work who has a larger truck with a pipe/lumber rack on it to haul it up there for me. I’ll pay him, comp his gas, and take him to Buffalo Wild WIngs afterwards. In exchange, I get the first of several gates that are going to wind up up there.

So, assuming all th is goes according to plan (ha!) I’ll get the first of what I imagine will be four gates installed.

For the record, I may (I don’t recall) have told my neighbor he could zip his 4-wheeler across the place from time to time to make sure nothing was amiss, but now that there’s more stuff up there I need to rescind that. Hopefully a closed gate will get the message across. Sentry guns are the next step.

But it wasn’t all annoying news on the cams. Our buddy the fox got caught on video:

I finally figured out how to set the sensitivity and ‘action areas’ for the newer wifi cams, so I’m expecting some more interesting intel updates from up there than just what single still images provide. The tradeoff, of course, is power.  The wifi cameras come with some small solar panels to keep them charged up and transmitting. I’ll be swapping those panels out with larger ones in order to get the most charge out of the shortest solar exposure. So far, though, I’m liking these new cameras.sec