The systems are monitored and recorded by Garda personnel in the district Garda stations, using a video wall displaying each of the cameras forming part of the scheme and one or more spot monitors. Control of the system is shared with other duties and facilities such as telephone, radio communications and computer facilities.

Vigilant Technology has supplied digital recording solutions for 6 new town centre CCTV schemes at Drogheda, Tallaght, Mullingar, Sligo, Castlebar and Ennis. The systems will be installed by systems integration companies SKS Communications and Colemans. Phil Ridgeon, Vigilant Technology business development manager for Ireland said "We are delighted and thrilled to be supplying state-of-the-art recording systems like these. The Garda have demanded best of breed performance and our systems will deliver full frame rate recording of all cameras at DVD quality". Like many other public space recording systems the town centre CCTV cameras will be recorded for 31 days, with incidents being exported on to CD or DVD for use in evidence.

System sizes vary between 20 and 40 cameras depending on the size of the town. To commission systems quickly and reduce installation and running costs, many of the systems use wireless video transmission systems. Matrix switching systems display the camera images on a video wall at each control room and on operator spot monitors. Joystick keypads allow the operators to select cameras and pan, tilt and zoom them.

"The performance profile demanded by the Garda exactly matched our capabilities as a recording solutions provider" added Phil Ridgeon "Since our inception Vigilant Technology has always provided recording solutions which deliver high recording frame rate and excellent picture quality whilst being both very reliable and easy to use. This has lead to the use of our solutions at over 50 town centre CCTV systems across the UK, together with many other prestige shopping centres, corporate headquarters and systems for police forces and HM Prison service".

The recording solutions provided by Vigilant Technology are the very latest technology. High performance IP encoders digitize the analogue video signals received from the wireless transmission system. The digital video streams are then stored on intelligent network video
servers with RAID 5 storage. The use of RAID 5 technology together with dual redundancy of key
systems elements provides a recording solution which is highly resilient and designed to provide performance 24/7. The network video servers future-proof the recording system as these are able to record IP cameras and Megapixel cameras when these are required.

Live and recorded images are displayed on a number of review workstations, which have the ability to burn recordings and still images to CD and DVD. Phil Ridgeon added "The Vigilant Viewstation is acknowledged to be one of the best Graphic User Interfaces available for CCTV on the market. We spent many months designing an interface which allows people to access recordings quickly and intuitively. Over the years we have been supplying recording solutions we have fed back the comments of our customers in to the features of the Viewstation to provide a human interface which is second to none in the industry".