I've given up on RF in my house. It's been totally unreliable. Last night my MRF-350 and RFX-250 wouldn't respond to any input whats so ever. The emitters don't respond to any signals. They don't glow, they don't flash, they do absolutely nothing. I tried changing the receivers ID address and I tried moving the base station and the 250 around to no avail. I did get it to respond one time after unplugging the 350 for about 10 seconds and plugging it back in again. But then it quit responding again.

I must have a defective unit. I really don't need RF anyway since my equipment rack is about 15 feet from any given seating position and all the equipment is visible and not positioned behind doors or cabinets.

If I were doing this for a living I would certainly make sure that any installs I did were in a EMI free zone or I would be looking for a product that was less susceptible to RF interference. For those of you who have had to shield the base station in aluminum to protect it from interference, I certainly do feel for you. I can't imagine your clients having much confidence in equipment that has to be "Jury Rigged" in order to make it work.

I also found item "c." from the instructions in the MRF-350's owner's manual on page 4 quite comical as well.

"If your installation location simply doesn’t offer you any choice and
you are detecting interference everywhere you place the RFX-250 you
have three last resort options:
a. Remove the RFX-250’s antenna. This will reduce the range
enormously, but may still be enough for this client.
b. Extend a wire to another room. Try this over the floor first,
before attempting to conceal the wire.
c. Admit defeat and install a “pointing again” IR repeater system.

Who's admitting defeat here? The installer or URC?

Had the same problem. Tried (a) but range was about 10 feet. However, it did work. I then put a coat hanger in; extended the range to about 30 feet and picked up less interference. Pretty ugly, so I went back to IR. RF is great when it works, tedious when it doesn't.


I like choice (c). Quite a laugh.

Mitch,

It's been a while since we chatted. I feel your pain. As a custom installer, this is exactly what drove me away from urc. I was very embarrassed the last time I was caught by the customer while trying to "shield" the base station. This is exactly why we now only deal RTI, and I have been very impressed with the rf stability. I hope you get the chance to try it someday if you ever do need rf again.

Since you aren't using your RFX-250, would you be willing to trade for an RFX-150?
Or trade plus some additional money?

For the most part, the performance is ok, but occasionally, it's unresponsive so I may have some intermittent interference.

A new RFX-250 costs too much to try and then find out it's something else.

thanks.

I decided to hook it back up again and try and diagnose where the interference is coming from. As I mentioned, I really don't need RF but since I got the 350 and RFX-250 as a gift I thought I would go ahead and try to make it work reliably.

I hooked everything back up the same way I did originally and everything is working so far. But that's not saying much because a day or two after I got it hooked up we had a big snow storm up here in Western Washington and I lost power and cable. The power/cable have been going on and off over the past week until yesterday. So I really don't have any concrete data on reliability yet.

I have a tendancy to troubleshoot a problem up to the point just prior to total destruction of the offending device. Then I just walk away from it and come back in a day or two after I calm down and can think more rationally about the problem at hand.

Right now it's working but I'm sure it will fail within the next week or two.

Keep us posted.

I talked to Joel at URC yesterday and he thinks it might be a defective MRF-350. They are back ordered but he will send me a new one when they come in.

He also suggested that it might be a problem with me using the 3.5mm IR inputs on the back of my Denon 3805 and Integra DPC 8.5. He suggested trying it with the IR emitters instead. I really don't want to do that unless I absolutely have to.

Is it possible that I'm having a problem because of the type of cable I'm using? I think one of my 3.5mm IR cables is a stereo cable and the other is a monaural cable. I thought someone here said it didn't matter. Plus the problem is so intermittent you would think the cable would fail all the time. Not just occasionally. I would say everything works about 75% of the time lately. I'm still suspecting some rogue RF interference.