Review on SMONET Wireless 8 Channel Surveillance Megapixel by Sean Liu

In December 2016 I bought my first Smonet NVR which was only 4ch. It's been pumping every day since then. Unbeatable for the price and features. Now I've found that I need to add more cameras. I bought this system because I already had a 4TB HD and four existing cameras that I wanted to add to this new system that gave me 8 channels. The new system worked right away and they were 2MP 1080p cameras versus the 1.3MP 960p cameras I already had. Now with this system I had no problems when it came out. The problem I had was that I wanted to move the cameras from the old system to the new one using the code matching process. I keep getting an invalid module error (-8) and the camera was not added. After working with computers for years, I noticed that the old cameras had the same IP address ranges 172.20.14.30 - .34 that the new system had already assigned to the cameras it came with. Whether or not I removed all cameras and added them one by one, they all seemed to have their Wi-Fi connection information and IP addresses hard-coded right into the camera. I was at a loss. I wasn't sure how to access the cameras to fix this. I contacted Smonet via email and they sent the steps needed to access the camera directly and an app to set up a LAN (not Wi-Fi) as it connects to my Switch so I could can access the camera configuration of the website. After that I followed the steps to update the WiFi SSID and password for the new NVR information and also changed the IP addresses of the old cameras to 172.20.14.35-38. After doing that and saving, I went through the process of matching the NVR's system code and BOOOOM! All old 4 cameras connected without any problems and worked. Although Smonet's support hours are based on the Chinese time zone and aren't really available to me during the day as I'm in EST, they always answered my emails and were very helpful. The assistant's name was Crystal. Overall I am a happy customer and will continue to use their products as the price usually can't be beat. This $159 system was a good deal as it would have cost me that much for just 4 cameras, basically at the current price of $35. So it wasn't difficult to use this setting for cameras and NVR. The only thing I want to change is the antennas on the cameras. My old ones can do that, but they seem to have a cable going from the camera to the antenna, so you have to open the camera to swap them out. I have external extended antennas on the NVR because the NVR is in the computer RACK system. I will also try to expand the WiFi functionality of the cameras as two of them are for a separate garage very close to the base station and I would like to improve the signal for them. In general I am satisfied and I recommend these systems for easy and quick DIY jobs.