I Built a Jamming-Resistant Home Security System After My Neighbour Got Broken Into

After a break-in on my street, I replaced my Ring setup with a wired, jamming-resistant UniFi Protect system — and learned a lot the hard way. Here’s the full build: cameras, recorder, rack, power backup, and the mistakes I made so you don’t have to.

A few weeks ago, my neighbour’s house got broken into. What stuck with me wasn’t just the break-in — it was how. They had cameras. Wireless ones. And the one detail that changed how I think about home security: the crew had jammed the signal, and the cameras caught nothing useful.

I already ran a Ring system with professional monitoring, and I like Ring. But that story sent me down a rabbit hole, and I came out the other side with a completely different philosophy — and a fully wired, jamming-resistant UniFi Protect system built around it.

This is the honest, start-to-finish journey: what I planned, what I bought, what I got wrong (twice, in some cases), and what I’d tell myself if I could start over. If you’re weighing a home camera system in 2026, I spent the money and made the mistakes so you don’t have to.

The Problem: Wireless-only security systems (Ring, Arlo, Blink) ride on RF that a cheap handheld jammer can knock out — and once the WiFi’s jammed, there’s nothing recording anywhere.

The Solution: A wired PoE camera system with a local recorder that keeps writing to disk regardless of internet, WiFi, or cellular — backed by battery, and kept as its own isolated “island” alongside my existing eero network.

Why Wireless-Only Cameras Fail (The Jamming Problem)

How wireless cameras get defeated by signal jamming

This is the part most people don’t know until it’s too late. A modern smash-and-grab crew doesn’t hack anything. They:

Cut the internet at the outside box
Jam WiFi (2.4/5 GHz) — killing every wireless camera and hub
Jam cellular — killing LTE alarm backup
Cut power — killing anything not on battery

Wireless cameras are defeated at step 2. And here’s the kicker I found while researching: the jammers that do this sell for under $50 online. Ring did add 24/7 continuous recording, but it’s cloud-only — so the moment the internet’s gone, nothing is being recorded, anywhere.

That reframed the whole project for me. The goal wasn’t “more cameras.” It was: no single action by an attacker — cut power, cut internet, jam WiFi, jam cellular, or even steal the recorder — should take out both detection and recording.

Wired PoE cameras keep recording even if the WiFi is jammed — that’s the entire point.

The Philosophy: Wired, Local, and Isolated

Three principles drove every decision:

Wired beats wireless. PoE cameras connect by Ethernet. You cannot jam a cable. This one fact is the foundation.
Local beats cloud. A recorder on-site keeps writing to its own disk with zero dependence on the internet. Cloud is a bonus copy, not the backbone.
Isolated beats integrated. I kept my existing eero mesh for WiFi and built the camera system as its own self-contained “island” that doesn’t depend on it. (More on why below — this saved me from a much bigger, more expensive project.)

Ring didn’t get thrown out. It stayed as an independent second system — its monitored alarm and doorbell run in parallel. Two ecosystems, two failure domains. That’s redundancy you can’t get from a single vendor.

The Build, Layer by Layer

The camera island: switch, recorder, PDU and battery

Cameras (the eyes)

I went with UniFi Protect G6 cameras — 4K, PoE, local recording, no subscription. For a corner lot, coverage matters more than camera count: both street-facing facades, the side yard, the rear, the driveway, and the garage.

One hard lesson on license plates: every G6 lists “license plate recognition,” but that’s misleading. Plate reading is about optics, not the AI flag. A basic G6 Bullet only reads plates up close and slow; the G6 Pro Bullet (2.36× optical zoom, larger sensor) is the one that actually resolves a plate at the street, at night. If plates matter, that’s a real distinction — not a spec-sheet checkbox.

Garage coverage: mount high in the back corner, aimed at the doors, so daylight lands on faces — not behind them.

The recorder (the brain)

This is where I made my biggest back-and-forth. I started with the tiny UNVR Instant (built-in PoE, single drive) — perfect for 3–4 cameras. But as coverage grew past six cameras, I hit its ceiling, and I ended up swapping to the UNVR G2 (records up to 30× 4K, supports RAID for drive redundancy).

The lesson: if you know you’re going to expand — buy the bigger recorder once. The Instant is a great starter, but if your endgame is 7+ 4K cameras and drive redundancy, you’ll swap it. (Good news: swapping is a DIY job — cameras just re-adopt.)

Switch + power distribution

The UNVR G2 has no built-in PoE, so a UniFi Pro Max 16 PoE switch powers all the cameras, plus a floodlight and future sensors. A UniFi PDU Pro handles power distribution with per-outlet metering — which, bonus, told me my real rack draw so I could size the battery precisely.

The rack

Everything lives in a 12U glass-door wall cabinet in the basement network room, mounted into wood studs. (Honest tip: the sleeve anchors that came in a “just use these” baggie are for masonry — for wood studs you want ¼–5/16" × 3" lag screws into at least two studs. Hang it empty, then load it.)

My layout - Patch panel up top, switch pro max 16, UNVR G2, airflow gap, then the PDU Pro at the bottom near the battery.

Power backup

The whole chain — ONT, gateway path, switch, and recorder — runs off an EcoFlow battery in UPS mode. Measured real draw came in around 75W average (far below my ~200W estimate), which meant I could size down the battery and still ride out a normal outage comfortably. Measure before you buy — spec sheets lie.

Network: the “camera island”

I run eero for whole-home WiFi and didn’t want to rip out three brand-new eero 7 Max units. So the cameras live on their own switch/recorder island, connected to eero by a single cable. eero does WiFi; UniFi does cameras. No conflict, no wasted hardware.

What Survives Each Attack

Here’s the whole design goal in one place — each attack, and what keeps working:

Cut mains power — Battery carries the whole rack + cameras
Cut the internet — Recorder keeps recording locally
Jam WiFi — PoE cameras unaffected (all wired)
Jam cellular — Local recording continues; local alerts fire
Steal the recorder — Offsite clip backup preserves evidence
Single drive failure — RAID keeps footage intact

No single move takes out both detection and recording. That’s the point.

Living With It: Tuning the Alerts

Recording everything is easy. Getting useful alerts without drowning in them is the real work — and it’s where I spent the most fiddling.

The setup that finally worked, Ring-style:

Smart detection only (Person/Vehicle), never raw motion — kills false alerts from wind, shadows, and headlights.
Detection zones so the driveway camera stops alerting on every car passing on the public street.
Two layers: an always-on alert layer for baseline daytime awareness, and a separate armed profile for aggressive, loud nighttime alerts.

The gotcha that cost me hours: In UniFi’s Alarm Manager, if you put the same alarm into an armed profile, it overrides the always-on behavior — it only fires when armed. The fix is to keep always-on alarms and armed-profile alarms as separate alarms, even if they watch the same camera. This is poorly documented and counterintuitive.

What I’d Tell My Past Self

Wire once, expand forever. Have the installers pull cable to every future camera spot in one visit, even the ones you’re not using yet. The labour is the expensive part; cameras are a 15-minute DIY add later.
Buy the right recorder up front if you know you’ll grow. I swapped mine.
You probably don’t need the AI Key. G6 cameras already do plate/face/person detection on-device; the AI Key mostly adds search polish you may never use.
Measure your power draw before sizing a battery. Mine was a third of my estimate.
Keep Ring. It’s a great independent second layer — don’t think of it as either/or.
The camera “island” is underrated. You don’t have to rip out your mesh to go UniFi for cameras.

Conclusion

I started this because my neighbour got robbed and their cameras saw nothing. I ended up with a system where the cameras keep their eyes open through a power cut, an internet cut, a WiFi jam, and even the recorder being stolen — all while my eero mesh keeps doing what it’s good at.

Was it more work than clicking “buy” on a wireless kit? Yes. Did I make mistakes and buy a couple of things twice? Also yes — and I’ve documented those in a companion piece so you can skip them. But the result is a genuinely resilient, locally-owned, subscription-free security system that does the one thing my neighbour’s didn’t: it keeps recording when it matters most.

The single most important takeaway: In home security, the detection layer can always be defeated — sensors and alarms can be jammed. The recording layer is what you protect. Make it wired, make it local, and put it on battery. Everything else is detail.

Why Wireless-Only Cameras Fail (The Jamming Problem)

This is the part most people don’t know until it’s too late. A modern smash-and-grab crew doesn’t hack anything. They:

Cut the internet at the outside box
Jam WiFi (2.4/5 GHz) — killing every wireless camera and hub
Jam cellular — killing LTE alarm backup
Cut power — killing anything not on battery

Wired PoE cameras keep recording even if the WiFi is jammed — that’s the entire point.

The Philosophy: Wired, Local, and Isolated

Three principles drove every decision:

Wired beats wireless. PoE cameras connect by Ethernet. You cannot jam a cable. This one fact is the foundation.
Local beats cloud. A recorder on-site keeps writing to its own disk with zero dependence on the internet. Cloud is a bonus copy, not the backbone.
Isolated beats integrated. I kept my existing eero mesh for WiFi and built the camera system as its own self-contained “island” that doesn’t depend on it. (More on why below — this saved me from a much bigger, more expensive project.)