Camera traps take pictures of the events at the feeding place. Depending on the camera model, the cameras store these images locally on a memory card or they promptly send the images via data connection to the customer, usually by e-mail. The information via image is popular with many customers and represents a useful tool.
However, for a number of reasons cameras are only of limited suitability for an efficient monitoring of a feeding place:
Most camera traps have a notoriously high error rate. Often, images are not only sent when (black) game is active at the feeding place, but also for a variety of other occasions. The user has to filter the whole data stream.
They are often complicated to set up and to operate with. Many users are overwhelmed with setting up the cameras, especially when it comes to data transmission.
- Which SIM card is suitable?
- Which tariff must be chosen?
- How is credit charged, so that the SIM card will not be locked and won’t sent pictures anymore?
- How do you set up the image delivery correctly and data-saving?
Just like with converted mobile phones, the evaluation and processing of the data is a major problem. From an incoming stream of e-mails from multiple cameras, you have to difficultly reconstruct "by hand" what is happening at each feeding place. With several feeding places the continuous working out of temporal patterns becomes a time-consuming and frustrating task.
Finally, camera traps in many federal states are subject to restrictive legal regularisations (data protection!), which makes the use impossible in many places.
The BOARMASTER system picks up the strengths of the previous approaches and eliminates their weaknesses.