A-V Senders ...

[Arfa Daily]

Anyone got any experience of these ? Daughter just fixed her 'retired' LCD TV on the wall of her bedroom. Although primarily, her and her husband will be watching stuff that's been put onto a portable hard drive streamer, she thought that it would be handy to be able to watch stuff that she's recorded on her Sky+ box, so at the same time she bought the wall bracket, she also bought a TescoSonic (or whatever dreadful name they call their stuff) 2.4GHz AV sender. I went round there to fix the bracket - she doesn't trust her poor old hubby with fixing something heavy to a stud wall ! - and when it was all in place, he hooked up the sender. Although it worked after a fashion, it was basically unusable in reality, as each of the four selectable channels it had, was wiped out by bands of heavy duty interference. It had that 'frequency-hopping' feel about it, and my immediate suspicion was that it was interference from their broadband wireless router, which is located in the lounge, pretty much below the bedroom. I had him turn it off, but it made no difference at all. Slight improvements could be made by doing a Laurel and Hardy and standing on one leg with the receiver unit held at arms length, whilst stroking the cat with the other hand, but in the end, no results that were useable, so I guess this must be interference from the neighbours wireless router.

Anyway, she took the AV sender back to Tesco, and got her money back.

So, question is, has anyone else had this problem, and managed to resolve it with any particular make or model? Obviously, there are many available, but she doesn't want to keep going through the process of buying and returning, if it's a problem that's never going to be resolved. I would estimate that the receiver would be probably diagonally equidistant from the the transmitter unit and their wireless router, and that distance would be, at a guess, no more than 20 feet and through a standard plasterboard ceiling and chipboard floor. Obviously, a little further to the attached neighbour's router, assuming they've got one, and it's not upstairs just the other side of the blockwork party wall ... Much further to the neighbour the other side.

My preferred method of sorting this would be to run a cable. It's not a big house. But if anyone has any useful experience on doing it by the wireless route, I'd be interested to hear.

TIA

Arfa

[John]

I'd be inclined to run a coax from the Sky+ box (not heard great things about AV senders at all) and then get one of these Powermid remote extender thingies - they're brilliant:

[Toby]

> or

for a Sky box, you can get a remote eye that connects to the co-ax, that work very well in my experience!

Toby...

[John]

>>> or >>> for a Sky box, you can get a remote eye that connects to the co-ax,

That is, of course true. In our case we have a distribution amp that wouldn't pass the 9V DC that the Sky magic eye requires so the best way round it for us was the Powermid. To be honest it's a while ago and I'd forgotten about the Sky magic eye.

On the upside though, a Powermid works with anything, not just a Sky box. My hifi sits next to the Sky box and can be seen by the Powermid so I can control that from upstairs as well - and yes, I do have speakers in the bedroom connected to the amp downstairs :o)

[Lobster]

>>>>> or >>>> for a Sky box, you can get a remote eye that connects to the co-ax,

Do you know if it works with a VirginMedia V+ box? The CPC listing says it's not compatible with NTL/Telewest so I'd assume not...

David

[John]

>>>>>>> or >>>>>> for a Sky box, you can get a remote eye that connects to the co-ax,

Sorry David, haven't a clue mate and there's no-one in our street that I know of on cable so I can't even try it for you. However, I fail to see why it wouldn't work. You point your infrared remote at the Powermid transmitter upstairs, it converts it to RF, which is picked up by the Powermid receiver downstairs and squirted out as infrared again - can't imagine what's different about VirginMedia infrared?

[tony sayer]

Yes sometimes it works more often than not it doesn't or is subject to interference. The world and his missus are using 2.4Ghz now and interference is very prevalent. Some areas have a wireless router in every house round here!. Let alone vid senders and of course microwave ovens..

Suggest that you run a cable or seek out someone who retails 5.8 Ghz units this is much less crowded but like 2.4 can suffer heavily from in building attenuation....

[John]

Using PassMark Wirelessmon 3.1 I can see 18 other wireless routers besides my own here! :-) or should that be :-(

[JTM]

Well we use what was probably the cheapest sender (Unidom R) we found in France about 3 yrs ago. Both units are in the same room about 40' apart and someone walking between them shows interference on the TV.

Other causes of interference include the location of the laptops, (still watch-able) location of the DECT 'phone (watch-able) and using the microwave in the kitchen (through a 750mm thick wall.

Trying through 2 fairly solid partition walls over 10metres was pretty useless.

John

[Jeweller]

I'm just contemplating a similar project here. GAMI seems to be required.

[John]

>> Do you know if it works with a VirginMedia V+ box? The CPC listing

GAMI??

[Jeweller]

>> Do you know if it works with a VirginMedia V+ box? The CPC listing

Get A Man In

[John]

>>> Do you know if it works with a VirginMedia V+ box? The CPC listing

Aha :o)

[Mathew Newton]

Years ago I had a Pace STB from Telewest and the remote used IrDA IR codes rather than the more-common RC5 standard. I imagine therefore it is the protocol differences that may cause difficulty as a remote extender probably works more on a store-and-forward principle rather than a straightforward repeater.

NTL/Telwest are now Virgin Media so chances are the reference is out of date so all could be hunkydory now. No guarantees of course...

Mathew

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember "Arfa Daily" saying something like:

Years ago I had one (still got it) of the Lidl/Aldi 2.4GHz 4 channel senders and it worked after a fashion, but was terrible when the microwave was used and once I got wifi working it was curtains for it. Never could get it to be reliable after that.

[Arfa Daily]

Grimly Curmudgeon wrote in news: [e-mail]:

Yep, that sounds like it :-(

Arfa

[metronid]

[e-mail]:

I found one for 99 cents

[Lobster]

That's now at 1550 cents and counting; and the seller doesn't ship outside the USA...

[Arfa Daily]

> Hmm. That's now at 1550 cents and counting; and the seller doesn't ship

Interestingly, one of the electronic component suppliers that I deal with, sent me their monthly rag a few days back, and in it, they have a 5GHz AV sender for the same money that was originally paid for the one that was wiped out by interference. It says that this one is specifically designed to not be interfered with by wifi, cordless phones etc. We might just give it a try. Having said that in the advertising blurb, if it was no good, they would be obliged to take it back for refund.

Arfa

[Andy Burns]

802.11a and 802.11n WiFi does and can use 5GHz respectively, the former has never been very popular in the UK, the latter is likely to become increasingly popular ...