CuddeLink 2+1 Cellular Starter Kit, IR AT&T & Verizon

I’ve used a lot cell cams over the years. These are not like those!! If you see them up right, they are excellent cams. I have mine spaces over 30 acres and have excellent signal quality. One simple cell bill (optional) for multiple units. Build quality is great and Cuddeback has been excellent at answering my questions to make sure I had a quality deployment. I have removed all my other rail cams and continue to increase the Cuddelink footprint. I highly recommend to anyone that is looking to spread cams around their property.

Have on 160 acres that family hunts on. Cameras work well. Only time will tell how durable they are. Like I can add up to 24 cameras and only have one cellular bill.

I have a property with sketchy service except for one area. I bought these cameras hoping that they would work in other areas of the property with no service and they did! The only down side is that the picture takes a little while before I get it, anywhere between a 10 and 30 minute delay. However, I am getting pictures sent to me in areas where I have no reception, so I will take that all day long!

After doing some lengthy research on cellular trail cameras, I landed on trying the Cuddeback brand. Having some acreage and juggling multiple cameras with multiple cellular photo plans, this solution of a single cellular plan and ability to run up to 24 cameras was very attractive. Cameras seem well built overall and the menu navigation is easy enough. That's about the only positives I can state. The negatives - Customer Service was terrible. Support replies seemed to be very short in steps and reasoning and it took multiple emails to get a straight answer. It was almost like they were being graded on how quick they could reply to a question with as little information as possible. Multiple times they referenced a setting that my camera package didn't even have. Photo Trigger - For transparency, I only set up one camera for testing as I didn't want to mess with multiple for each change I was needing to make. I set it up approximately 30 ft from a feeder. I went days without it triggering from wildlife. I could walk by the feeder, during the day, and get it to trigger. That was the only testing photos I could get. While I don't know if I got deer during the day, I know they were there at night due to the amount of feed that was gone. For the test photos that it did take, quality was just "meh" for me. Sadly, I'm returning this item and the search continues.

Cuddeback has always stood for quality in outdoor cameras. I was very disappointed in the documentation and set up. The manuals that came with the camera appeared to cover products that weren’t in the box. The set up procedure in the manual did not match the icons on the cameras. The website requires email authentication which never arrived nor did the icon required to send the link ever pop up in the set up. The cameras are extremely complex and the manuals don’t make things any better.

The cameras are heavy and seem to be built well. I have one at my gate and one on my drinker that gets hit hard and emptied by elk. They constantly miss taking pictures and when they do, it takes a long time to be sent to the home unit. I recently purchased a competitor’s camera and set side by side. The competition’s camera sends the picture in a minute after the trigger and the cuddleback when it takes a picture takes hours to send the pictures. Batteries last 3-4 months only. 02/26 I recently changed the batteries and the app kicked me off and now I can’t get back in. Called customer service for app support, and they could not get me back in. Now it’s been days.

I've owned 9 different Cuddeback cameras with my first two being purchased 12 years ago. All of the previous cameras were SD card only, and I only had a few issues over the years, mostly because of user error. Naturally, when I wanted to monitor my cabin property remotely, I decided to go with this Cuddeback cellular starter kit. I dedicated an entire afternoon to getting the base unit and two cameras set up, which required a bit of 'filling in the blanks' from my limited tech experience. First, the QR code didn't work when I tried to register the home unit, and I wasn't able to add the numbers manually either. After several failed attempts, I called Cuddeback customer service (which never let me down before), and ended up with voicemail. That was 7 days ago and I still haven't heard back. Well, after several re-boots of the app and my phone, I finally got the unit registered and then trained myself how to use the units with trial and error. After 3 hours I started getting photos, which to me was quite an accomplishment since there was ZERO help from the company. The second day of operation, I see a notice on the app that I have to load their new app, and they tell me to go to the app store for the new version. When I go to the app store all I can see is a button to 'open the app' which takes me right back to the useless app I already have. For crying out loud! And is this important? Well, since I'm getting nighttime photos during the middle of the day, that have a time and date stamp of when they were sent, not when they were taken...yeah, I think the right app is important. Imagine having images of criminal activity with photos that are that far off...a good lawyer would totally destroy any evidence you thought you had, which makes the darn cameras useless for security and not so great for game activity either. So what can a person do when customer service DOESN'T CALL YOU BACK? As a lifelong Wisconsin resident and Cuddeback customer, this Wisconsin company is a HUGE disappointment!