I ran it 12 hours at max FPS and bitrate and 12 hours at the settings
@mephisto_uk posted in this thread (15FPS).
I experienced zero "No Signal" issues.
Therefore, I am leaning towards folks that are having No Signal issues in BI that it must be a bottleneck in your system somewhere - cheap POE switch or one close to power budget, faulty wire or connection, networking issue or an issue with the ethernet port in the computer. I would suggest trying it with a POE injector to isolate the power and see if the problem goes away. If it does, then you know it is the POE switch.
I am now going to hook it up to a cheap POE switch that I know if I use every port will result in dropped signals. I will try it first with just the 180 and then add cameras.
I wanted to share my own experience with the camera, and your post was a good intro to that. I got mine last week and managed to set it up over the weekend.
The way it's wired up, I have about 75-100' of pretty decent Cat6, outdoor rated, going to a weatherproof box that holds a little power strip and a small 4-port PoE+ switch. The switch
says its power budget is 78W but I'm now very skeptical of that claim. Anyway, from there it's another 20-25' to a post by the street where the camera is mounted.
When I first plugged it in I was concerned because I'd see it ping for a few seconds and then stop. Then a few seconds, and stop, etc. I looked at the PoE switch and would see the indicator turn on/off/on/off every few seconds. So, I realized I had a problem there. Besides this new camera, I also have a 4MP Amcrest and an outdoor wifi AP. The Amcrest should only be in the 4-6W range. I haven't checked it to be sure, but other similar cameras on my Brocade PoE that actually lets me see the power usage are in that range. I'm not sure about the access point though. It's a TP-Link EAP225 and a quick search tells me power should be around 10.5W.
And when I was testing the new camera, I had it on the Brocade and saw it was using around 5W without the LED lights turned on (I didn't think to check what it was when those are shining), but my outside testing was during the day anyway.
Of course, as it happened, the port I plugged the new camera into was #4 so when power usage is too high for the switch, that's the first one it cuts out. I moved it over to port 2 and moved the Amcrest to 4 which, for some reason, got them all happy with each other. The Amcrest may pull less power when starting up, whereas perhaps this 180 cam has some spikes during boot that the switch didn't like as much?
So that was all happy, and despite the long cable runs and an apparently crappy PoE switch, the camera was working fine, no signal loss.
Then I decided to swap out that Amcrest with the old boobie cam that the new Dahua 180 replaced, and I ran into power budget issues again. The old twin cam, I'm not sure how much power it draws but it must be more than the Amcrest because I just couldn't get it all happy. I ended up unplugging the outdoor AP which is just a "nice to have", and meanwhile I ordered a new PoE switch with a 120 or 128W budget (and smaller too, but an external power brick), so I'll be swapping that out.
FYI, that old PoE+ switch with a supposed 78W budget is a Yuanley: "YuanLey 5 Port Gigabit PoE Switch with 4 Port PoE+ 1000Mbps, 802.3af/at 78W Built-in Power". Super cheap on Amazon and it fit into the enclosure, and up 'til now it fit the bill.
The new one I ordered is this one which is not so cheap, but will take less room in my crowded enclosure: "TP-Link TL-SG105MPE | 5 Port Gigabit PoE Switch | Easy Smart Managed | 4 PoE+ Ports @120W, w/ 1 Uplink Gigabit Port"
Fingers crossed it works.
All that to say, so far, once I unplugged that outdoor AP to get the 2 cameras out there working, I haven't had any signal loss that I've noticed. Uptime right now is 16+ hours and no signal loss.
