With Uniden Security Mobile Apps, you can view a live-stream of your video surveillance feeds from anywhere. Control your system, receive alerts, and monitor activity real-time to stay on top of your home’s protection. Uniden's Guardian G2720 security kit is an attempt by the company to make home or office surveillance systems as simple as possible to install and use. The kit comprises two wireless cameras, one 7in tablet-style monitor and a base for the tablet. Video can be monitored live on the tablet, over a home network, or over the Internet. You don't even have to know much about networking to get all that working either — it's very much plug-and-play. The quality of the video from the cameras is adequate, though video size is small in order to facilitate recording, and frame rates can vary depending on how good the camera signals are. Setting up the Uniden Guardian is just a matter of finding appropriate locations and power points for the two cameras and then switching everything on so that they can be found by the base unit. You probably won't want to put the cameras too far from the base unit — when we placed the cameras further than 10m from the base unit, the frame rate ended up falling dramatically. The cameras can be fixed with screws up high on a wall or ceiling if they are to be used for security purposes, but because the cameras have external antennas that screw into the back, you'll need to make sure there is enough space for the antenna above the camera's mounting spot. The metal stands on the cameras are adjustable; they have ball joints that allow for vertical and horizontal movement. This joint felt a little too soft and loose, and we had to really tighten the butterfly screw hard in order to make the camera not move at all from its desired angle. Each camera will need to be plugged into a wall outlet and the power adapters have about 4m worth of cable to work with. You can place the cameras outdoors as they are weatherproof, and they also have infrared LEDs, which means they can work at night. As we mentioned earlier, you won't want to position the cameras too far from the main base unit. The specs say they can do 150m, but we found the range to be much less in our test environment at the office. The cameras run in the 2.4GHz frequency spectrum (using frequency-hopping spread spectrum and encryption), and they can, in some instances, cause interference to your wireless network (unless you are running a 5GHz Wi-Fi network). We noticed this after experiencing very slow file transfers (under 500KBps) to one of our laptops while the Uniden Guardian was on, and faster transfers (up to 10MBps) while the unit was off. Using the Guardian kit isn't hard. The cameras are paired to the base station by default — we didn't have to do anything ourselves to connect them — and you can see video on the screen practically straight away. Up to four cameras are supported and viewable on the 7in screen at once. We were able to view our two cameras with ease and the beauty of the system is that it also allows you to record streams from these cameras directly to the base's SD card (a 4GB card is supplied with the unit). The 7in tablet unit is very easy to use as the screen supports touch. It's resistive though, which means that sometimes you have to press firmly in order to get something to work, and we found that we did have to press quite hard most of the time (a new firmware was released to remedy this somewhat). You can simply press on each quadrant of video to make it full screen, and you can press on the menu button on the left to enter the system settings — not there are many — and also to enable Internet mode (as long as the base is connected to your local area network via an Ethernet cable). The quality of the video from the Guardian's cameras was generally good during our tests, but quite small at 320x240 pixels — we couldn't find a way to change this. Because the cameras are designed to have a wide field of view, there is some distortion on straight vertical lines, which manifests as a slight curve. Microphones are also installed, and you can hear audio through the tablet if you tap on the camera to full-screen the view that you want to listen to. Frame rates were smooth as long as we kept the cameras within a good distance of the base unit, but at the outer reaches of the range the frame rate dropped to less than one per second.
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March 2019
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