Poor Detection Range

Recentl;y purchased a stick-up battery ring camera. I have it outside looking up the drive at our two cars. It’s at a height of rought 8-9ft (cant go higher without going a lot higher due to house layout).

One main concern I have is that the detection range is very poor 10-15ft. I thought they were supposed to be atleast 30ft. I have looked at the motion settings and the only options I get are zones and sensitivity. However some help articles show a range slides. I dont get this.

Any thoughts?

Hey @Pokit101. What position do you have for the Min to Max slider under your Motion Zone settings? Having it closer to Max should help capture the motion that is happening further away, but depending on the view the camera has, it may still be restricted. Do you mind also sharing a screenshot of what your Live View looks like?

Camera will detect if lucky if I go the the back door of the front black car. Ideally I want to nearer the red but dont expect to get the red fully covered

Hey @Pokit101. Could you try putting your Motion Sensitivity Slider all the way to MAX and then adjust your Motion Frequency to Frequent? This should help ensure you get the most of the motion detection, and in addition, if you have People Only Mode, try turning this off more. People Only mode may ignore more of the area around the cars when on, so turning it off if you have it on should help too!

There is little you can do. Setting the motion sensitivity to max may help, but probably not.
The Ring Stickup Cam Battery Version (and the newer Gen 3 version when set to Battery Mode) doesn’t actually run the camera all the time. The camera is asleep until the passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor senses motion and then it would wake the camera, connect to Wifi and start recording. The PIR motion sensor is like the ones you have inside your house, takes almost no power, but has only maybe 15-20 feet of range. Now, add 2-3 sec of delay for the camera to wake up and start recording, it may seem like the motion detection range is only 10 feet. That is kind of weak when the subject is walking towards the camera.

The wired stickup cam, or the newer ones when operated in wired mode will run the camera all the time and compares the frames of the video to detect motion, those are able to detect motion at near unlimited range provided the moving object is large enough to be seen. However, using wired mode would drain the battery in about 12 hours, so even if you have a large solar panel charging the battery, it won’t last over night.

I wish Ring would put a mode where it would use WIRED, and automatically fall back to BATTERY when the battery is low. This would make “Wired” more operation viable on solar power for most of the day (maybe until 4am or something).