As my friends and I are doing more exploration we are finding there is nothing more dissapointing than finding a shaft, rigging it, descending it to find it goes to nothing.

Also it can be frustrating to get to a shaft or winze underground and not be able to see whats above or below you.

Has anyone had any experience of putting a video camera on the end of a rope/stick and dangling it down a shaft to see what is/isnt there. Preferabely with a screen for playback.

have done a little of this,see denzil vids on utube or give us a bell

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Dines and the 6" maps are usually enough to tell you what's what and if it goes.

Just drop them!

you obviously have not been to st blazey woods before! More shafts than you can shake a stick at!

Lots of trees to rig off!

Yes in most places, the main problem is there are too many holes to make random drops viable!

Yes in most places, the main problem is there are too many holes to make random drops viable!

If that's your local patch you should count your blessings. A large number of us live in areas with a finite number of holes, if any...
A lifetime of exploring!

Sticking a camera on the end of a rope isn't a good idea as it will inevitable hit the side of the shaft at some point and you'll probably need to buy a new one - and as some shafts are a bit on the wet side that'll have the same result. I built a casing to hold a digital camera with the facility to take video (Canon Powershot A1200 to be precise) out of bits of wood and aluminium and plastic tube that I had lying around, illumination via an LED Lenser P7. Amazingly, as it cost nothing to build, it works! Hang it on the end of a rope, set it running, switch on the light, drop it down (needs a bit of practice to minimise the rotation effect), pull it back up and, hey presto, you can see what's at the bottom (and anything interesting on the way down).

Back in the 80's here in Cornwall I used to work on TV/Video equipment, a video recorder turned up in the workshop one day with a tape in it, the tape was of a shaft decent at United Downs it was very good although I cannot remember the name of the shaft, Grylls maybe or something like that. I do not know if it was a bloke on the end of the rope holding a camera or just the camera on its own but I do remember that it's decent was quite stable. I think the footage was taken by someone at either Wheal Jane or Mt. Wellington possibly. As a guess I would say there must have been a drum winch feeding a centralized pully wheel over the shaft.

Lozz

were planning to use if possible a high line with a pulley in the center or if nothing to rig off a long stick with a pully on the end of it.

Would be awesome to have a direct feed from the camera to the surface but am guessing that would be some serious £££

We were considering a go pro hd with a torch attached but then theres the question of how to watch it back at the surface.

gopro now do a remote camera add on,if you look on their website you should get an explanation. I dont understand the techno bable ! but iv e just been to the gopro stand down at fistral boardmasters and seen it work

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Some video cameras have a 50 or 75 ohm composite video output so enabling the signal to feed into a standard coaxial transmission line, you wouldn't need the expensive high quality stuff just bog standard aerial coax would be fine, that could be taped every 2 foot or so to the rope and you could plug the surface end into a monitor, you can get domestic wideband transmitters that you don't need a licence for but I am unsure of the maximum range, with a transmitter you would have to be limited to line of sight unless you rigged up a leaking feeder system but that would cost quite a lot for an off the shelf job and would probably require a repeater over long distances. The other poss is a wildlife/surveilance camera, some now come with a reasonable amount of digital storage. Out of all these I would plumb for an oldstyle video camera with an analogue composite video output and stuff that up some coax, if you used a higher grade coax you might even be able to dispense with the rope.

Lozz.

A 100 mter roll of RG59U coax is around £40, cheapo monochrome cameras are cheap, if you lose/damage the camera it won't break the bank, led light clusters can be got cheap, You can use a twin wire feed taped to the coax for the DC feed, depending on lamp current consumtion you may be able to use a single wire and use the outer of the coax for the DC feed. For the coax single strand inner is best, the signal power attenuation over a correctly terminated coaxial line of 100 meters should not to be to bad.
Just an idea.

Lozz

I am tending towards Cat 5 cable and use a pair of balun's for the video, the other cores would power the camera and some Led lighting or use self powered lights.
Cat 5 cable is as cheap as chips!
Capture the video on a laptop.
Only done initial experiments so far, from my previous attempts stopping the camera spinning is the biggest problem!
Perhaps Cat 5 will be better as it is dispensed from the box.

IA Recordings have put together some very trick camera gear for their video productions...

http://www.iarecordings.org/minecam.html 

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