Comment on Why are people disconnecting or destroying their Ring cameras?

• FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I have a few Amcrest cameras and they’re pretty decent as well. Outdoor rated, PoE, 4k, UV LEDs, they have PTZ variants too and offer standard RTSP streams without any kind of vendor software hassle.

  Running a local NVR with some image segmentation and classification models is goodbut also consider adding a bit of Kismet and SDR trickery. Having a bit more awareness is always useful and the radio spectrum is increasingly full of useful information that can be relevant to home security.

  Most people are also radio beacons of some form or another due to their tech/car/flipper zero and being able to detect things like modern cars, people wearing bluetooth earbuds, wifi deauthentication attacks or new radio sources which could indicate some kind of hostile surveillance or tracking… those are all useful and relatively simple things to monitor. With a bit more money you could make some good estimates about the location and relative motion of these sources.

  You could also add some cheap SDRs and listen to your local county’s dispatch trunking system. This is perfectly legal, it’s all broadcast in the clear. CB users and scanner owners used to do this but it became harder once they switched to trunking systems because you required some kind of processor to navigate the trunking protocol. Now you can do the same thing with 2 cheap RTL-SDRs and some open source software: www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9KJrtIO8_4 Language models reading transcripts of these could alert you to any major events near you, like a traffic accident (or active shooting, USA! USA! USA!).

  Obviously this is a bit more involved than ‘Press buy button on Amazon, login to camera, glue to wall.’, but the end product that you can create is better than anything that you can buy as a commercial product.

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  • TunaLobster@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The audio system in my car is broken. I use my SDR to stream the radio to my phone and play it on a Bluetooth speaker. Overkill? Yes. Learning experience? Yes.

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    • FauxLiving@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I had a similar experience, playing with a spectrum analyzer connected to the SDR and the first signals that I ‘found’ were the WFM broadcasts and celebrated by listening to the radio for a few hours.

      In hindsight, I didn’t realize how much the antenna size and just happened to have the right length antenna to get good WFM coverage.

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