Hi Doug. 

We often work in remote areas like rainforests, desert, Australian outback, etc so we often have to develop custom hardware. We haven't seen anything that fits our needs in a budget range that could accomodate the projects that we work on. 

We've since gottenr requests to make the devices publicly available but are still working on finding time to document and set up the manufacturing for them. 

However you may be interested in one of the designs we've been using in the Middle East and  Australian outback. It's for 3G cellular communications and has inputs for a solar panel and rechargeable batteries. We're manly using it to connect periodically to a cell tower and upload data it collects from other wireless devces (LoRa) in the area. But you can also use it for streaming if your solar/battery capacity is large enough. 

If you're interested us, please direct message us on WildLABS and we can discuss more and perhaps set you up for pre-release hardware. I've included some pics below:

Akiba

Hi Doug. 

It's actually an interesting application, however it might actually be cheaper to try and put together an off-the-shelf solution rather than go custom. There seem to be some livestreaming trailcams that might give you what you want almost out of the box. The Spartan GoLive trailcam seems like it might do this. Also other animal webcam setups seem to use a combination of WiFi security camera + a WiFi-LTE modem. This might actually be the cheaper and quicker way to go.

I do think that having a cellular streaming camera setup specifically for wildlife is a really interesting design. Trailcams are generally designed for camera trap functionality so I suspect the live functionality would be an afterthought. I'm curious if they have to deal with things like heat and recovering the stream after the communications goes down. 

In our designs, we assume a very resource constrained environment, ie: no power sources, little or no connectivity, etc. So looking at a design where it's specifically expecting a power source (ie: dedicated large solar panel) and good/decent cellular connectivity with the design focus on uptime might be something interesting to pursue. 

But for now, I recommend checking out the live trailcams or a wifi security cam + LTE bridge setup. And if you're interested in a dedicated solution specifically for wildlife cams, I'd love to discuss what the requirements would be. It might be super useful for wildlife orgs and parks to build awareness and improve funding,as well as benefit the research and conservation community.

Akiba