The Swann MaxRanger4K Solar 2 Camera Security System
A home-camera system that operates without Wi-Fi and power cables
Your columnist’s home, a 210-year-old cottage in West London, was for the last 60 years owned by a renowned TV producer, who, being on her own and apt to go away on long shoots, grew increasingly paranoid about burglaries.
So, in the 1990s, she had a complex network of hardwired sensors installed to form a comprehensive burglar-alarm system. The sad thing is that today, due to the coming of wireless security systems from the likes of the superb Ukrainian company Ajax and others, the entire installation is obsolete, and the ugly cables snaking round every doorframe and window are wholly unnecessary.
The woman’s home-security setup that we painstakingly ripped out over the past two years didn’t include cameras, as they were rare and expensive in the 1990s. Today, security cameras operating on the home Wi-Fi can be had for a few dollars, and they add a layer of protection and reassurance.
But, for the most part, these cameras still require external power. So when it comes to outdoor surveillance, you’re talking electricians and a disruptive channeling of power—and in many cases, after all this, home Wi-Fi isn’t even powerful enough to reach the cameras.
The Australian tech company Swann has now come up with the ultimate easy-install, high-performance camera system. And their new MaxRanger4K is hugely impressive, at a price. The substantially built but still compact cameras are solar-powered, so need no cabling. And instead of trying to piggyback on your home’s Wi-Fi, they come with their own independent radio network operating at 866 MHz, which makes it far lower in frequency—and hence more penetrating—than 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi.
Swann claims this long-range radio connection is good for 2,000 feet in the open air and 600 feet in a normal home or garden. That means you could easily station cameras and self-install them on the perimeter of a sizable estate without the need for a single cable.
In the case of our old home, the signal is making it at full strength from the end of the yard, through 70 feet of vegetation, many yards of brickwork, and timber. No Wi-Fi camera we know could do that reliably. And even the starting-to-fade mid-fall daylight is more than ample to keep the cameras charged. Swann says a few hours of light in winter will be sufficient to keep them powered up.
The color video is bright and clear day and night. There’s two-way audio, spotlights and sirens, and a menu of alert cues to choose from in the Swann app: motion, people, cars, and even vehicle or body heat.
The indoor hub that comes with the kit has 64 Gb of local memory for extensive recordings of any unexpected action around your property, plus free cloud backup for extra recording when you need it—there aren’t any sneaky subscriptions. The hub also has a rechargeable battery, providing up to five hours of backup power in the event of an outage. The kit comes in sets of two, three, and four, and you can attach up to eight cameras in total.
The Minelab X-Terra Voyager Metal Detector Set
A metal detector might not make you rich—then again, it might …
Anyone with a fondness for quirky, gentle British entertainment that is both funny and wonderfully reflects the occasional eccentricity of British village life—and especially obsessive hobbyists—should seek out all three seasons of Detectorists, a show that ran from 2014 until a fantastic series finale in 2022.
Detectorists is about a group of metal-detector enthusiasts in the rich and history-saturated countryside 100 miles east of London. It may not necessarily encourage you to buy a metal detector, but if you have access to land where historic stuff happened and treasures of monetary or archaeological value might lurk, you may be intrigued enough to buy a detector for a holiday distraction.
Metal detectors run from $20 on sites like Temu to several hundred and even a few thousand dollars from leading makers such as Garrett, in Texas.
This X-Terra Voyager detector set, which includes a pretty sophisticated device, headphones, a shovel, and even a backpack, costs just $149.99 but comes from a company that builds everything from military mine detectors to $8,000 instruments made especially for gold prospecting.
South Australia–based Minelab was started in 1985 by Dr. Bruce Candy, a South African–born, Cambridge University–educated physicist and inventor. His first Minelab models were specifically for gold prospectors, and he has a string of patents for metal-detection technology.
Landing Gear has been testing the absurdly good-value X-Terra Voyager on the bed of the River Thames when tides allowed, and in no time we unearthed some nails that could be Roman (or not), and, while digging that up from a depth of eight inches or so, a fragment of pretty Victorian or Georgian pottery.
The Xhdata or Sihuadon D-808 Portable Radio
Get your news and music the old-fashioned way: for free!
Speaking of nerdy, predominantly male tech hobbies, I mentioned in the previous Landing Gear an exciting and unapologetically retro radio recently purchased on Amazon, which is proving an ever more terrific distraction while I write.
The Xhdata D-808 (also known—such are the vagaries of Chinese branding practices—as the Sihuadon D-808) is an old-fashioned, all-band radio, with all the features a radio enthusiast could yearn for, from Air Band coverage to FM to AM, to longwave, to full ham-band coverage, including the all-important B.F.O. (beat-frequency oscillator) to resolve both lower and upper single sideband. Regarding the latter part of that last sentence, if you know, you know. And if you don’t know, you really don’t need to.
The shortwave bands are almost empty these days, like a global ghost town. All the amusing, sometimes informative propaganda shortwave-radio stations, from Radio Moscow to Radio Peking, seem to have gone. Much of the entertaining transcontinental fat-chewing on the ham bands, which for decades have engrossed famous radio hams from Donny Osmond and Marlon Brando to Priscilla Presley and Walter Cronkite, now seems to have turned into blips and buzzes thanks to two inexplicably popular speech-free transmission modes, FT8 and FT4. (As previously mentioned, don’t ask.)
For just over $100, the D-808, whether made by Xhdata or Sihuadon, is a glorious and incredibly compact piece of new but dated technology, and it works wondrously.
THE BBC SOUND EFFECTS LIBRARY
Sounds to make you nostalgic for an age you never lived through
How interesting, or conceivably useful, would it be to have the world’s greatest and most extensive sound-effects library, which has been collected these past 100 years by the BBC, available online and for free?
The BBC has released its entire archive of some 33,000 strange and often surprisingly evocative effects, which can be downloaded for nothing, or if for commercial use, around $5 each.
Snippets include: a recording of “several men snoring hilariously”; the clucks of a “more-or-less normal chicken”; 69 different sounds of penguins; jungle, desert, and Arctic background tracks, and everything in between; Model T Fords starting; a multitude of warfare sounds recorded over 100 years; college bells ringing in Oxford; a Patagonian waterfall; a submarine Klaxon; the sound of a 1969 British Ford Cortina door slamming shut.
One of the many fascinating things about exploring the BBC archive is the strange phenomenon by which we can be made to feel nostalgic by such stimuli as smells and sounds for things we never actually experienced.
Several thinkers, among them reputedly Jean-Paul Sartre and Milan Kundera, have touched on this, and the sensation will work differently depending on your life so far. But, for me, the BBC recordings of R.A.F. Spitfires swooping by and German flying bombs attacking British cities are extraordinarily evocative, despite dating from decades before I was born.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
