Hold on every body!
There is nothing wrong with the Remote or the IRF-6, we have installed a ton of these things and have tried everything. The biggest problem is the low gain antenna- “CABLE”
What you have to understand is that these RF remotes are basically garage door openers, meaning they operate at about the same frequency’s (in this case 418Mhz) as a garage door opener or at the mid band of a radio scanner, if you want to learn about this kind of stuff, try some place like www.maxrad.com or equivalent.

You see the problem you are having comes from the need save money on packaging, that little RG-nothing cable and antenna (called a rubber duck) weigh next to nothing and fit nicely in the little box, which just happens to be the same box they use to package the remote in.

First off RG-58 is the minimum 50-ohm cable that should be soldered to the board and ideally RG-8 is really the way to go. The best place to put the antenna is directly above where you use the remote the most, the higher the better. Obviously the wire they provide does not allow this and splicing on to this cable is not going to help without an amplifier.

So here is a guaranteed David G. trade secret (guaranteed to ruin your warranty) drill a hole in the side of the end of the blue box near the antenna and attach a PL259 jack. Cut the existing cable soldered to the circuit board down to 2 inches and solder this on to the Pl259 jack, attach to this jack to a less than 50 foot length of RG-8 run this up hi someplace like the attic and attach on the other end to a Radio shack pole mount scanner antenna with a PL 259 jack on it, or better yet get a 418 MHz freq. matched pole mount antenna.

We use this system for whole home automation (the RTI techs do not like it when you say that). I can’t guarantee the aforementioned will work for you since you probably have little experience with such things, but you should get a noticeable improvement or at least have fun trying.

There are other set in stone, works every time tricks (some we may actually market) But I will save that for latter, but lets just say that we have come up with a way to use the RF feature of the remote anywhere in a house bigger than Bill Gates. With out adding any extra wires or antennas.

The RTI for the money is the best remote in the world, if you know
#1- how to program it right and
#2- how to install it right.

If you feel the need to get politically active, e-mail RTI and tell them to hire a go getum CEO. Further, tell them to make an IR only version of the blue box with a dinky link, so you can still use the sensors and speaking of sensors tell them to hurry up and build an optical sensor. Oh and an RS-232 adapter with “bi-directional communication would be cool to” but probably cost prohibitive.

Blessings