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Any cuddeback experts on here?

Gun, I’m slow on the uptake. Why have a non cellular home? I assume you can pull one home card from a non intrusive location to check pics from several cams??
 
Windlooker said:
Gun, I’m slow on the uptake. Why have a non cellular home? I assume you can pull one home card from a non intrusive location to check pics from several cams??
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Exactly. It just saves having to pay for a cell plan. They also made a non camera home/repeater. The cell cams have to have an active plan to work. I personally think the non camera cell unit is the best option to get every possible picture. Because of the way the system works I am not sure 100% is a realistic expectation

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Windlooker said:
Gun, I’m slow on the uptake. Why have a non cellular home? I assume you can pull one home card from a non intrusive location to check pics from several cams??
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Not everyone wants to lock themselves into paying for a cellular plan. Set one of your cams to "Home" and it will collect all the pictures from all the other cams on the property. Put that one somewhere easy to access and you can get all your pictures from a single location. No more walking into the "Good Spot" to pull cards during season.
 
gunrunr said:
Not everyone wants to lock themselves into paying for a cellular plan. Set one of your cams to "Home" and it will collect all the pictures from all the other cams on the property. Put that one somewhere easy to access and you can get all your pictures from a single location. No more walking into the "Good Spot" to pull cards during season.
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What is the range that I can have this home cam from the others on the property?
 
Same as the camera to camera distance and best answer is "it varies"
Line of sight i have done it at a full half a mile - if there is a big hill in the middle it is less
Cameras have built in signal meter to tell what sort of reception they are getting to make it easier to find a good spot that will work.
 
Hawk32 said:
I’ve heard this before and questioned it myself. Have you ever put a regular camera in same location to test this
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Sorry this is so long but I feel it may help someone

I have been running cuddelinks since 2017. They have missed a lot of pics. They have the latest firmware updates and I have replaced the lenses. I run all my cameras facing a northerly direction.

I have mounted a browning black ops and a cuddelink G camera on the same post, the browning just above the cudde, overlooking a corn pile after season for survey. The cudde took 40% less pics than the browning.

The place that cuddes are valuable to me is in areas of my land that there is no reception for actual cell cams. This is in bluff country and so there is lot of opportunity for areas that don't have cell reception.

I run all cuddes and repeaters with an extra battery pack attached. They will be dead by the end of December to end of January after being set out in mid August. It can average from a 1000 pics to 2500 pics per cam before they are dead. It takes approx 15.00 for the 10 D batteries per cam and repeaters I use. I also will set up a repeater as a home came after season and not use a plan so I can still survey property post season. That is a nice option. I buy 3 or 4 months of unlimited pic plans. That costs 40 dollars per month.

I've had 4 out of 10 cams fail since buying them. Cudde has stood behind each one and replaced them. One repeater( I highly recommend repeaters to make the sending of pics easier on batteries and better pics received) failed after warranty expired and I didn't try for any product support.

I run 20 spypoints on the rest of the property.(started with spypoints in '20 and have built up the numbers since then) All but 4 are 2 years or older. It takes approx. 8.00 for the 8 double a batteries in each cam. I get 4 to 6 thousand pics sent to my phone before the cams have eaten the batteries. I have the pics sent one time a day. They also take many more pics than the cuddes set up in the same spot when tested. I use the spypoint club plan to get 250 free pics per cam each month but pay for monthly plans when it comes to Sept through November. The plan I purchase is 8.00 per 1000 pics. I average approx 2.5 plans per camera through November. I watch the cams closely and buy a monthly plan when the "free" 250 pics are about done, then upgrade to the 30 day plan. When that runs out before the 30 days I will upgrade the plan to unlimited and it is prorated for what time I have left. I then start at the 250 pic again and when they are about to run out, I repeat the process.

I've had 2 spypoints go bad during this time. One was still under warranty and the other not. They covered the warranty one and credited me with enough spypoint bucks to replace the other if I wanted to.(just banking it until I see a deal I want to blow it on) Their customer service has been extremely helpful in the several times I've had issues with cameras. The helped me work through the issues remotely and the cameras worked fine after that. (except the two that did die) They have a chat option to get after a problem fast and correct it. I really like that option. I have seen all the bad reviews they get and i really don't understand why based on my experience with them. I really think it is user error and camera placement. One can't expect a cell cam to work in areas with poor reception.

It costs roughly 20.00 to run the cuddes for a "season" and it costs around 33.00 to run the spypoints for a "season". I get 2 to 4 thousand more pics from my spypoints than the cuddes so to me it's easy to see where the best value is. If one has good reception on their hunting land I highly recommend spypoint cameras. I run the inexpensive link-micro lte. I've bought those cams from anywhere from 2 for 69.99 to 2 for 89.99. The value of the cams is significantly cheaper than cuddelink when one just factors in how much each unit cost and divided by how many years they have been used. My cuddes will have to run at least 6 years to get close to the value of a spypoint that runs for just 2 years. The vast majority of my spypoints are on their 3rd season.

Besides the brands mentioned above I have run bushnell, moultrie, wildgame, gardepro, and couple other brands I don't recall. Of these, gardepro was the next best, but not a cell unit. wildgame and moultrie were junk, 100% failure shortly after warranty was up. As one can tell, I'm a camera junkie but I believe I've settled on my drug of choice, for now:)

The hunters who hunt my property help split the cost of batteries and plans so it make it really much more affordable than it looks.
 
As I learn this system I’ve come to the conclusion that I do not receive all photos taken via email. Someone suggested putting a different cam with one of my Cuddes to compare.

Each Cudde has a sd card. I pulled a card and believe the cam is good, triggering 99 % of the time and forwarding the pics to the home cam. Each day I receive a report outlining battery life, images taken by each cam etc. It’s actually a good comprehensive system.

But, my home cam report has a count of 10366 images received from the remote cams, and without a doubt only a fraction of those are being emailed to me.

Next year home cam only with no cell plan.
 
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That’s interesting. I will start paying attention to that as well. I was little disappointed last night I watched 3 deer come out in front of cam at separate times last night and fed in front of the camera. Should have had multiple pics but only received 3.
 
Anyone notice that they changed the design on the new Rayovac batteries I think a little and they aren’t making contact in some of the Cuddelink cameras? Never had a problem before until this last batch I got and they looked a little different. Had to put a washer in between so they make contact.
 
I’ve had that on the old AA j cams after using a rechargeable battering. The springs get pushed down. I had to rig up something to stretch springs back out and then they worked fine.
 
Since this thread has been revived, I'm curious what camera settings you guys are using on the L series camera? I have 2 of them reporting to the cell home (non-camera, no cell plan). I had a old school browning hanging under each camera and the browning cams were taking 5 times the number of pics as the cuddelinks. I originally set them up in Easy mode, but since then I have changed that to Security mode, 2 pictures. I also increased the sensitivity to High 2. I haven't recently compared the pic counts to the brownings but I am getting way more pictures than before, more like what I would expect from my tacticams. If a buck is working a scrape I will get 6-8 pictures in 1 minute where before I got maybe 1, or maybe it wouldn't pick up the deer at all. They definitely need the sensitivity cranked up it seems, and hung lower than I am used to with other brands.
Have others noticed this or is there something wrong with mine?
 
TimberPig said:
Since this thread has been revived, I'm curious what camera settings you guys are using on the L series camera? I have 2 of them reporting to the cell home (non-camera, no cell plan). I had a old school browning hanging under each camera and the browning cams were taking 5 times the number of pics as the cuddelinks. I originally set them up in Easy mode, but since then I have changed that to Security mode, 2 pictures. I also increased the sensitivity to High 2. I haven't recently compared the pic counts to the brownings but I am getting way more pictures than before, more like what I would expect from my tacticams. If a buck is working a scrape I will get 6-8 pictures in 1 minute where before I got maybe 1, or maybe it wouldn't pick up the deer at all. They definitely need the sensitivity cranked up it seems, and hung lower than I am used to with other brands.
Have others noticed this or is there something wrong with mine?
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I have had cuddelink system for several years now. Started with J cams on AA batteries on down to now having several L cams in the fleet. All with solar panels running to a home cell cam.
I have to agree, they don't catch what other cams do. I have a brand new L cam on a feeder in KS. Deer were barely hitting it and it had me confused.
I hung a brand new tactacam 3.0 there and got 25 more pics on that cam just in one night. Both cams were pointing at the feeder and both on 1 minute intervals.
Maybe it is settings related but I tend to think they just don't pic up as much. People have mentioned this for years and I kinda figured, how bad can it be. This test made me a believer.


**Side note, Cuddeback is living in the stone age compared to these new tactacams. The cuddelink system is really the only thing they have going for them. The tactacams you can set them up, turn on wifi and get a live feed to your phone to stand in front of it and get it pointing correctly, etc. The pics are damn near HD quality with the thumbnails, and then you can request HD photo per pic and it's only .10 and it's amazing clarity. The video mode is awesome.
The App is super easy to use and you can sort pictures with galleries, etc.
One drawback is $12 per cam for unlimited is pricey. If they could get this down to $5-7 per cam or some type of bulk data plan like wise eye has, they would take over the market IMO.
 
They are not really designed to compete with the stand alone cell cams. The radio frequency they transmit over is a limiting factor. They will never be able to transmitted video, hd photos etc due to this. Theu are primarily for low to no service areas or a more affordable option to running large numbers of cameras for those can can accept longer intervals between photo dumps. Changing the fresnal lens to the centered vs the wide will help detection and lower set up is key to wider detection zones. Waist to top of knee. I have cuddebacks, Spartans and reveals and they all miss more pictures than I would like unfortunately

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I'm on ALOT of other people's farms. I would say 90%+ people hang cameras too high (I'm not talking about way up in a tree pointing down to avoid detection).

The center mass of a deer is around 2' off the ground. maybe a hair more. That's the height you shoot hang a camera (unless way up in a tree). Most the cams I see are 4-5' off the ground. Way too high!
 
We have several cell plans between hunting partners, and we have each of these plans send to both of our emails. We do this with multiple different people. Almost daily one of us will receive a photo and the other never gets it. Definitely some issue there, and suspect misses many potential photo captures. But, the link system is simply unmatched for large tracts of land with many cameras running in close proximity.
 
Last night I had 2 bucks sparring in front of an L series camera and it took 12 pictures in 1 minute. Obviously 2 bucks creates a lot of movement but that suggests that sensitivity is what has been lowering my picture counts. My counts have gone way up by setting sensitivity to H2 and so far I have had zero false pictures that weren't caused by a deer walking out of frame so I am going to max out the sensitivity at H4 the next time I am at those cameras.
The times that I have bothered to count, I have never had my tacticams take more than 5-6 pictures in one minute (even on delayed send) so I think that is all they are capable of. It appears that the cuddes are capable of more so that is a bonus.
 
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