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How to build a nestbox
There you'll find some details and a plan how to build your own nestbox. You should use only real old parts of real wood that have no protection painting. It's very useful to install a trap to look inside the box, for eventual cleaning or inspection of the nest.
The lower picture shows the original nest box seen from inside the house. You can see clearly the first camera and the additional infrared light emitting diodes (LEDs). The second camera has been installed on the very right upper corner (inside the box). -
Outside view
You will see the frontside of the house with small aeration slot as you find them in older farm buildings. The nest box is just behind this slot, attached to the wall inside.
The picture on the right shows how to place a nest box in a church tower. -
Transmission equipments
In 2001 we used one channel of an ISDN-line. A standard PC (AMD 850) with a videograbber card is connected to the line via an ISDN router. As a surfer clicked on the webcam link, the streaming server of P & T Luxembourg made a call to this ISDN line and the PC started sending data. We used a 35 kbit/s stream for transporting the digitized video and audio data to the web server.
In 2002 a leased line of 128 kbit/s was offered by P & T Luxembourg again. The equipment was improved. The PC with grabber card is the same. A special leased line router was installed, connected to a hub, and to a device that allows to switch on and off each of the above devices. This is very helpful in case of software crashes or wrong behaviour of the machines. There are two streams that are sent to the streaming server, a 25 kbit/s stream for use with PDAs and one 35 kbit/s stream for standard computers. There is no audio transmitted this year.
In 2003 we used an ADSL connection with 192 kbit upload speed, that allowed to generate two streams, one with 24 and another with 64 kbit/s.
No online cam in 2004.
There is an ADSL connection again in 2005. We use a PC with an external USB video grabber. The digitized output is led to the P & T streaming server in Luxembourg City.
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Installation details
For 2002 the nest box is equipped with two low-budget black and white cameras with integrated infrared LEDs. There are some other LEDs around the box to give a smoother lighting. Actually the 2 cameras are toggled by an electronic circuitry in regular periods of some minutes.
The infrared light barrier in the entrance of the box is connected to a big red LED in our living room above the TV set. It goes on every time something (an owl...) is between the light barrier, so we can switch easily from any real TV programme to the "next box channel". -
snapshot gallery
A series of snapshots taken via the internet. This is exactly the image quality than anybody on the web could watch.
You'll find there too 3 video clips showing the fixing of the rings for registration purposes.
Since march 2002, the owl parents have often visited the nestbox. Many thanks to P & T Luxembourg; they installed a transmission line again, even using a higher bandwidth. The stream was online from may till october.
