Whats the BEST IR Remote extender?

[MoBigsley]

I bought a recoton and its worthless I mean absoultely worthless. Does any one know of a really good IR remote extender?

thanks

[groundhog]

Are you talking about the cable that hooks up to the Tivo to change channels on the SA receiver, or are you talking about those pyramid things, that allow you to change channels from another room.

I have the RCA pyramid things. They work pretty good, but the room is pretty close(35' between pyramids) & if someone is between the two pyramids they won't work. Otherwise, no problems.

[scarabus]

Originally posted by groundhog
Are you talking about the cable that hooks up to the Tivo to change channels on the SA receiver, or are you talking about those pyramid things, that allow you to change channels from another room.

I have the RCA pyramid things. They work pretty good, but the room is pretty close(35' between pyramids) & if someone is between the two pyramids they won't work. Otherwise, no problems.

I've got the X10 Powermid (I think it's called) and it works great. I have a TV and the IR sender in my bedroom, and the receiver is downstairs near my TiVo.

TiVo's RF output is plumbed in to my in-house cable. So I don't get stero, but the picture is better than when I tried using the video sender - too much interference on the 2.4GHz band these days. I also got one of their programmable remotes and taught it the important TiVo signals.

However the Powermid does kick out some spurious IR signals. This can interfere with TiVo's control of the cable/sat decoder, so it's vital that you put an IR tent around the emitter.

[LMartin]

I use a product called the Remote Sender (used to be called the Leapfrog a looong time ago). This has a small module that you stick on the front of the remote instead of a pyramid or IR-receiver you place somewhere in the room(s). This is nice because you don't have to point it at anything in particular, and can use it anywhere without adding multiple pyramid IR receivers (provided the distance between you and the base RF receiver isn't far and you don't encounter interference.) It runs off a 12v battery commonly used in electric lighters or vehicle keyless entry remotes, which lasts a good long time (months). Reception does degrade as the battery gets low.

I have been very pleased with this overall. In general, all of the IR->RF->IR devices have similar drawbacks, including intermittant functionality in places with high RF noise, certain types of building construction, etc. So your mileage may vary.

I had to order my original Remote Sender from www.smarthome.com because no one else in the world seemed to sell them at the time. I've since picked up a spare at Circuit City. It seems they started carrying a re-branded version several months ago in limited quantities. I can't recall their exact product name (it IS the exact same device however.)


LM.

[groundhog]

TiVo's RF output is plumbed in to my in-house cable. So I don't get stero, but the picture is better than when I tried using the video sender

I ran a Cat 5E data cable(similar to phone cable) to RCA jacks that have 110 type terminations on them. The video is clearer than using coax and the sterio & dolby pro logic works great! It's limited to about 150 feet. The jacks are kind of hard to come by, but well worth it.