Only some of this information remains relevant today to someone interested in "finding hidden cameras". For example, I found page 10 very interesting to read about; what is presented there would probably make for a very fun hackathon project or similar.
As for the info on RF detection, nope. Few things use PAL/NTSC now, mostly devices bought by people not doing research buying the tales spun by the cheaper spy shops. If you find something using analog video, I'd treat it as suspicious. If the device isn't obviously doing spy things, it's probably some completely forgotten-about system not connected to anything anymore.
You'd be better served doing analog Wi-Fi RF analysis - whether just figuring out "why is there a gigantic 2.4GHz/5.8GHz/etc signal specifically in the corner of this room", or even seeing whether the camera firmware is vulnerable to the WPA2 attacks. And that's hoping the device uses Wi-Fi; if it uses a LAN, your best bet may be an EM/RF finder (which AFAIK start at $900+ for a basic good one) to try and pinpoint the camera electronics, and hope you don't get distracted with random benign things like in-wall thermometers, chemical sensors, and whatnot.
As for modern camera size, I just did an image search for "phone camera module" and then "tiny camera module" and found items quite a fair bit smaller than what's shown in this PDF.
- A bit more searching found the TS5828 5.8GHz A/V transmitter; this is not _tiny_, but it most definitely is very small.
One of my rainy-day-when-I-have-more-money projects is to get a tiny camera like one of the ones above, a transmitter like the one above, and a tiny rechargeable battery, and see how compact I can make the result. I'm putting it off until I have more money because I know I'll obsess about it until it's _really, really small_...
Somewhere on Amazon there is a screw camera that has a product photo of the camera installed on what appears to be a bathroom stall door. I can’t find it right now, but it totally blew me away that they’d be so blatant.
I've had a look at the Naneye you linked - I couldn't find the reason why the camera would not be optical. Optical in the sense of "has an optical system with a detector that registers photons close to the visible spectrum" (in contrast to microwaves).
I can imagine it's got a pinhole and a CCD, which is why there have to be four powerful LEDs illuminating the vicinity for it to reach the 44fps framerate without everything being just noise.
Could you lay a better camera on a flatbed car and push that car from behind with an engine? So it would be an engineer's eye view. And get power from the rails or from batteries on another flatcar.
It still needs to be quite small, as there are realistically proportioned tunnels, railroad station halls, and trackside buildings a large camera will bump into.
I wind up with about 20mm vertically and 30mm horizontally to work with when you count the space used by the flatbed.
I've found a lot like that one but they're all pretty low quality - that one's two megapixel. Far cry from the iPhone's 12, despite being physically larger.
I got a little SQ-11 camera with the same two-megapixel res and it generated truly awful imagery. I suspect the higher megapixel cameras generate better video even if they're squishing the data down to 1080p frame sizes.
As for the info on RF detection, nope. Few things use PAL/NTSC now, mostly devices bought by people not doing research buying the tales spun by the cheaper spy shops. If you find something using analog video, I'd treat it as suspicious. If the device isn't obviously doing spy things, it's probably some completely forgotten-about system not connected to anything anymore.
You'd be better served doing analog Wi-Fi RF analysis - whether just figuring out "why is there a gigantic 2.4GHz/5.8GHz/etc signal specifically in the corner of this room", or even seeing whether the camera firmware is vulnerable to the WPA2 attacks. And that's hoping the device uses Wi-Fi; if it uses a LAN, your best bet may be an EM/RF finder (which AFAIK start at $900+ for a basic good one) to try and pinpoint the camera electronics, and hope you don't get distracted with random benign things like in-wall thermometers, chemical sensors, and whatnot.
As for modern camera size, I just did an image search for "phone camera module" and then "tiny camera module" and found items quite a fair bit smaller than what's shown in this PDF.
- This is apparently 1x1mm, and a cursory but careful examination suggests it's _not_ optical: http://www.awaiba.com/product/naneye/
- A bit more looking found this slightly more accessible random option: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/1-12-CMOS-tiny-indust...
- I also found this generic "MC900A" camera that's very small, self-contained and spits out NTSC/PAL: http://spy.tips/shop/super-mini-520tvl-high-resolution-audio... (this is one of the random results, googling the model will find tons of this)
- A bit more searching found the TS5828 5.8GHz A/V transmitter; this is not _tiny_, but it most definitely is very small.
One of my rainy-day-when-I-have-more-money projects is to get a tiny camera like one of the ones above, a transmitter like the one above, and a tiny rechargeable battery, and see how compact I can make the result. I'm putting it off until I have more money because I know I'll obsess about it until it's _really, really small_...
FWIW, what I just described does already exist as a finished product. Here's a 2.4GHz version: https://www.selfdefensegearco.com/MiniWirelessSpyCamera.htm