15th June, 2026
Going Away These School Holidays? Check Your CCTV Before You Lock Up
Winter school holidays begin this week across Victoria and Queensland, with New South Wales and the remaining states following over the next fortnight. For families heading to the snow, the coast, or interstate to visit relatives, the to-do list before departure is long – passports, pet-sitters, and stopping the mail. The home security system rarely makes that list, largely because most people assume it’s already working.
It’s worth pausing on that assumption. An empty house during a school holiday period is exactly the scenario home security systems exist for – and exactly the scenario in which a faulty camera, a dead recording drive, or a blind spot nobody noticed becomes a real problem rather than a theoretical one.
The Numbers Are Worth Knowing Before You Pack the Car
Victoria’s residential burglary rate isn’t trending the way most people assume. Crime Statistics Agency data shows 30,545 residential burglary offences in the year to June 2025 – a rise of almost 14 per cent on the year before. Neighbourhood Watch Victoria has been explicit about the cause: property crime has increased in recent months, and homes left empty during holiday periods are easy for opportunistic offenders to spot.
Nationally, the pattern repeats. Of recorded break-and-enter offences, NSW Government data shows the offence is mildly seasonal, with more incidents during holiday periods – precisely when more homes sit empty for days at a time. Burglars aren’t typically casing a street for days; they’re recognising the signals that a house isn’t occupied – no movement, a stationary car, a mailbox that hasn’t been touched.
This isn’t a reason to cancel the trip. It’s a reason to make sure the system meant to protect the house while you’re away is actually doing its job.
What a Pre-Trip Camera Check Should Actually Cover
Most homeowners glance at a live feed on their phone, see an image, and assume everything is fine. That single check misses almost everything that actually causes a system to fail at the moment it matters.
Recording storage. A camera that’s “live” on the app can still be failing to record. Local storage drives fill up and silently stop saving new footage; cloud subscriptions lapse without an obvious notification. If the system isn’t actually retaining footage, a live picture today tells you nothing about what will be captured while you’re in another state.
Night performance. Daytime footage looks clear on almost any system. Night vision is where cheaper or ageing cameras fall apart – and burglary data consistently shows offenders favour the cover of darkness or the hours when a street is quietest. If you haven’t reviewed footage from your cameras after dark recently, you don’t actually know what they’ll capture.
Camera angles and obstructions. Garden growth is the most common blind-spot cause Mr Antenna technicians find on routine callouts. A camera installed with a clear view twelve months ago can be substantially obscured by a shrub or tree that’s grown through spring and summer without anyone noticing the encroachment from indoors.
Connectivity. Modern CCTV systems rely on a stable internet connection to push alerts and remote footage. A router that’s been quietly dropping connection, or a system that hasn’t reconnected properly after a recent power outage, can leave you with a camera that’s recording locally but sending you nothing.
Battery backup. For systems with any battery component – wireless cameras, backup power for the NVR – a check that the battery still holds charge is the kind of five-minute task that’s easy to skip and expensive to regret.
Why This Connects to Your Antenna Too
If your property has a combined antenna and security cabling setup – common in homes where Mr Antenna installed both during the same build or renovation – a pre-trip check is also the right moment to confirm the antenna distribution and any shared cabling infrastructure is sound. Storm damage, a loose connection in the roof void, or corrosion at a junction point doesn’t usually announce itself; it’s typically discovered when someone tries to use the system and finds it isn’t working.
For households leaving a property unattended for one or two weeks, an antenna fault isn’t urgent in the way a security gap is – but bundling both checks into a single technician visit before you leave means one appointment instead of two, and nothing left to chance while the house sits empty.
What to Do in the Week Before You Leave
Book a professional system check, not a self-check. A homeowner glancing at an app is checking that the system appears to be on. A licensed technician checks whether it’s actually fit for purpose – verifying recording, reviewing footage quality, confirming storage capacity, and physically inspecting cameras for obstruction or damage.
Do this at least a few days out, not the night before. If a fault is found – a failed camera, a storage issue, a connectivity problem – you want time to have it resolved before departure, not discover it as you’re loading the car.
Combine it with the basic deterrent steps RACV and Neighbourhood Watch both recommend: arrange for a neighbour or family member to collect mail and move bins, avoid obviously signalling an empty house through unmoved newspapers or undrawn blinds, and don’t post real-time holiday photos that confirm to a wide audience that nobody’s home.
Confirm you can actually access remote footage while away. Test the app from outside your home Wi-Fi network – ideally from your phone’s mobile data – before you leave, not after something’s happened.
Mr Antenna’s licensed technicians provide complete CCTV system health checks across Australia – covering recording integrity, night vision performance, camera positioning, connectivity, and storage capacity. If it’s been more than twelve months since your system was professionally reviewed, the week before a fortnight away is the right time to have it done.
