Spy Review

Wired CCTV camera systems have been around for years. There are many sophisticated boxes that you can buy that allow you to see many video cameras at once. Some computer-based camera systems can give you 16 windows from 16 different surveillance cameras at once! The Quad 2.4GHz Wireless Camera Receiver gives you the capability to see 4 spy cameras at the same time, but of the wireless variety.

What’s the significance of this? It is very unusual to find a wireless camera receiver that allows you to view all four camera channels simultaneously. Most other wireless receiver solutions only allow you to view a single camera channel at a time, and therefore the best they achieve is to just cycle through each camera channel.

The quad receiver is a robust white box with a number of buttons on the unit itself. You also get a 12V mains adapter, a audio/video (AV) lead, a 2.4GHz antenna and an infrared remote control. The kit is neatly presented in a white cardboard box.

Quad Receiver Kit
(Click to enlarge)

The quad receiver matches conventional wired systems with an array of features, such as alarm triggering, timestamps, datestamps and picture adjustment (such as contrast and brightness). The AV lead has 2 video connectors and 1 audio connector. This means you can plug the quad receiver into a TV/monitor as well as a video recorder at the same time.

Using the timestamp feature, you can record the footage for evidence purposes. In this respect, the quad receiver provides the core of a basic wireless surveillance system. All you need is a recording device and several wireless cameras. The quad receiver uses the standard 2.4GHz channels, so you can mix and match your cameras as required.

Adjusting settings on the unit is very straightforward, and I found it easier to use the remote control rather than the buttons on the unit to do this. You can tweak the time, date, alarm settings, event logging and all other features from the setup menu.

The initial layout of video streams is the 2 x 2 grid layout showing all four camera channels on a single screen. This gives you an idea of what’s going on in a single glance. This is probably the most useful layout of all.

If you want to see just a single channel, you can manually switch channels using the remote control or buttons on the receiver. You can also set the unit up to automatically cycle between cameras with a configurable delay.

If you have just 3 cameras, you could use the 3-way layout to show 2 small versions of a camera and a large view of the remaining camera in the background. However, the third camera is slightly obscured by the other images, so might be suited to a wide-angle camera perspective.

Another interesting view is to have just 2 cameras visible, but where the receiver pans left to right on the image so that you see each view in detail. I imagine this would become a distraction after a while, but useful for viewing 2 camera perspectives at once in detail.

The Quad 2.4GHz Wireless Camera Receiver is a neat bit of kit if you want to set up a simple wireless camera-based surveillance system. Since you use wireless cameras with this receiver, it makes it easier to set cameras up as you don’t have to install loads of wiring. If you have a large area of space to cover with cameras, you might consider using an external 2.4GHz antenna to boost the wireless range of the receiver. I can think of many different applications for this receiver, and its nice to finally see a wireless camera solution with CCTV (wired) system capabilities.