Yesterday in Indianapolis, MicroPower Technologies was honored with the second annual Golden Eagle Award. This award, sponsored by SDM, is from the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security (NCS4) at the University of Southern Mississippi. The award recognizes excellence in the safety and security aspects of sports venues by their designers, builders and installers.

MicroPower was one of two finalists in the 2014 awards competition, both of which presented their case studies to attendees at the 2014 National Sports Safety and Security Conference and Exhibition. After listening to both case studies, attendees then cast their votes for the winner based on five criteria.

The winning solution – described at the conference by Dave Tynan, vice president of global marketing and business development at MicroPower Technologies, and Joe Heinlein, IT director for the American Airlines Center – involved a surveillance solution for monitoring the 13 access points for the parking lots surrounding the facility. The security team at the venue, which hosts the Dallas Stars NHL hockey team, the Dallas Mavericks NBA basketball team, and many entertainment events, needed to be able to closely observe cash parking lot collections to ensure that employees followed protocol.

MicroPower Technologies delivered a comprehensive solution with cameras placed at strategic ingress and egress points around the center. Each solar wireless IP camera was positioned to provide close-up monitoring of parking ticket transactions, as well as tally the number of vehicles entering the lot. More than a dozen cameras were deployed at distances ranging from 65 yards to 550 yards, and each transmitted video back to a series of video hubs that utilized MicroPower’s proprietary TrustLinx™ wireless air interface.

“We wanted to provide greater security for both customers and venue employees as well as have better visibility of parking collections to compare vehicle counts with parking revenues,” Heinlein said. “We wanted to place cameras directly at the points of interest and transmit real-time video back to a monitoring location. Because the parking lots are covered in asphalt and cement and some are as far away as a quarter-mile, trenching and running cables was extremely cost-prohibitive.”

You can read more about both finalists’ projects here.