If anyone is looking for an alternative to a more expensive, purpose-built horse trailer camera system, I ran a little experiment this weekend, when shipping to an event 6 hours away. The fact that my transmission line split less than an hour from the venue, and five hours from home, is neither here nor there, but at least my trailer camera experiment was what I would consider a 100% success!
Supplies: [LIST=1]
I used a very strong suction-mount phone holder and attached the camera to it in the trailer. The model camera I bought is actually threaded for a legitimate camera mount, so it is likely I will upgrade to a mount that can be screwed into the aluminum header in the horse compartment. However, for an experiment, the suction mount worked perfectly, regardless of some rough roads.
I mounted the spare phone in landscape mode on my dashboard, turned on my mobile hotspot on my primary phone, and connected both the camera and the spare phone to the mobile network (fun fact: my mobile hotspot is named Silence of the LANS Mobile, heh). Bingo! I had a crystal clear picture and audio of my boy.
Details:
I have an aluminum Exiss 722 ST 2H BP. There is a tack room in front of the horse compartment. I do not have a bed cover on my truck bed. The camera has intercom functionality and night vision. I drove for 5 hours and experienced only the following minor issues:
- The app crashed twice. Simply hitting the "reopen app" on the error screen resolved this.
- Sometimes there was a bit of lag.
- Sometimes the picture froze, never for more than 10-15 seconds.
