was helping a dude other day pull cables for secuity cameras, we used mf100, anyway never went back cause he annoyed me. is the mf100 capable of suplying power to the cameras and transfering the picture too, just curious as never worked with cameras and want to know. i.e take someting away from it..
Standard cable for CCTV use is RG59, which has a solid core, plastic air spacing, and a braided outer. It is unshielded. For runs under 200m or so, more or less any co-axial cable with an impedance of between 50 and 75 ohms will handle video.
The MF100 cable you were using is unbranded, shielded coaxial cable, normally used in Sat TV and cable TV installs. It'll work, but it ain't great as the attenuation on it will be higher than for standard RG59 - i.e. won't work over as long a distance.
As for supplying power along the co-ax....that *used* to be the way - Sony, Panasonic, Dallmeier, and some others (mostly using rebranded Sanyo kit) all had what were known as line driven cameras - typically, a bandwidth filter to separate out video from power, and a signal driver, which injected the power. The down side was that it made swap outs expensive, and unless you had spare line driven cameras to replace the existing with on failure, standard cameras would not be usable.
More lately, the trend has been to run power separately, using either Shotgun cable, which consists of a standard RG59 co-ax and two single 1mm stranded cores, or composite cable, often confused with Shotgun - which has multiple cores in addition to an RG6 or RG59, to manufacturer specification for specific cameras.
Mostly, telemetry (movement and control of functional cameras) is achieved either using RS242 along Belden twisted pair cable, or what is referred to as "along the co-ax" or "down the co-ax" which is a return to the idea of injecting signals into the co-ax outside the bandwidth used for video signals. Most Manufacturers on the market today offer some kind of along the co-ax telemetry, to aid retro-installation of functional cameras, where only static was fitted previously.
As for power to cameras - this can be one of two typical values - either 12VDC or 24VAC are common, though many functional dome cameras use voltages upto 48VDC. Often, cameras which are external, will be supplied via mains to a switched fused spur adjacent (and inside) the location, and a power supply will be fitted locally either internally or in the housing.
