Well, I got an email from Matt, who requests that I pull that remote roaming video trick again that got used during the big Rusted Jesus show some moons ago. He needs roaming video for upcoming N17 show. No problem, but there'll be some improvements:

During Rusted Jesus show, it was dang dark, and the X10 cam I used for the roaming video wasn't a good choice. Let's face it, the X-Cam2 is just crappy webcam optics & ccd hooked to a pretty dang cool video/audio transmitter. Even after duct-taping it to a big "D"-cell Maglite, images were blurry and dark. This was the big problem to solve.

My first inclination was to whack apart an X-Cam2 and rewire it for an RCA analog video input, and using the battery base that came with an X10 package I bought to power the gizmo. I decided to forgo this approach when I couldn't find the aforementioned battery base and also remembered that I had a spare VT30A transmitter that would be even better if I could rig up a battery pack for it. If you want to try the cam hack, here's some good instructions.

VT30A requires 12VDC and draws 200mA, which translates into 8 1.5V alkalines or 10 1.2V rechargables. AA's would do fine, since I only needed to power the unit for a few hours. Since I had an 8-cell AA battery holder handy, I opted for the Alkalines and chopped the cord off the VT30A's wall wart to wire onto the battery pack.