RF Remote Rocks

[glbrown]

I recently put all the Sage junk in a cabinet with only power, sat feed, display, and speaker cables coming out of the back. The IR remote has been a real PITA. I rotate the display to accomodate viewing from my desk, couch, and worktable. Positioning the UIRT box to both receive the remote commands and control the 2 Dish boxes, now invisible in the cabinet, proved to be difficult. I built a 15 foot dual emitter cable for the sat box control so I could mount the UIRT somewhere in the room, and there was no good place, but it worked, kinda.

Adding insult to injury, the audio receiver is now invisible too. I used a Terk IR extender that worked ok for the receiver but it never worked with the UIRT so now I have 2 separate boxes to aim the IR remote at.

There has to be a better way.

http://www.weaknees.com/rf_remote_details.php

This thing replaces one of the batteries in an IR remote and turns it into an RF remote. I placed the UIRT inside the cabinet, set the RF receiver on top of the cabinet and taped the supplied remote emitter on the inside of the door of the cabinet. Got rid of the Terk extender and, so far ,) it works like a dream. At least 50 foot range, positive and quick control of both the UIRT and cheap Koss receiver.

And No More Pointing! Very hot.

[DFA]

You got my attention. I have TheaterMaster MX-700 remote and IRMan and USB-UIRT. The only remote I saw exclusively excluded was the Harmony so I suppose the MX-700 is a go.

Looks pretty cool and reasonably priced. What I am trying to figure out is how does the transmitter, which is housed in the battery compartment, have a clue about the IR commands being sent by the remote? Has to know somehow in order to transcode IR to RF.

When using this device, I also assume you need to blind all IR receivers from seeing what is coming directly from the remote control and only from the emitter of the RF receiver.

DFA

[Menehune]

I would assume that it detects the minute changes in power consumption from the batteries as the IR emitter is turned on/off and then transmits the pulse train to the RF receiver. It would work since most of the OEM VCR remotes I've seen didn't have any filter capacitors inside.

[glbrown]

The people at the show were not techs so could not answer the 'how does it work' question. They did say, however, that it doesn't work with remotes that have internal displays due to 'interference'. My guess is that Menehune has it right.

I did notice that the UIRT is subject to RF interference from my LCD and probably the CPU. There were certain places where the UIRT constantly blinked by itself indicating RF interference because there are no IR sources around.

Blinding the IR receivers was the easy part. I just shoved them all into wooden cabinet with a solid door. I blinded the emitter in the UIRT because I use external emitters to control the dish boxes.

[DFA]

Very interesting. Good to have a personal review. When I first look at things like this, I immediately think of things like the "Ronco Apple Peeler". I think it probably a marginal, barely get-off-the-ground kind of thing.

This is a rather clever after-market mod.

Thanks for the info.

DFA

[glbrown]

Yea, I had the same scepticism(sp). I tend to be a sucker for this kind of stuff unfortunately. But for the money it would have been a small loss anyway. Surprisingly, this is a real winner.

A little update. Placement of the RF transmitter looks pretty critical too. I have a couple of wireless mice and another keyboard that I thought would be a problem but they don't seem to matter.

I also learned that you can't put it on top of a Plextor ext dvd writer

[glbrown]

Still learning so I thought this might help someone.

The remote got slow and I checked the UIRT in the cabinet and it's just blinking away, flooding the space with IR. Unplug the RF transmitter and the IR flooding stops. Put a 20' extention on the emitter cable and moved the RF transmitter up and away from the cabinet. Flooding stops.

Sage responds to the remote as fast as you can press the buttons and every button press gets to Sage.

I wonder how often in the past I have:

- re-aim the remote and pressed the button again because 'sage didn't respond'
- pressed the button HARDER because 'sage didn't respond'
- blame sage, Carlo, et al for not doing what they are supposed to do

This is cool.