I've owned an MX-950 and MRF-300 for about 9 months now. The MX-950 is great, and I managed with a great deal of effort to get the MRF-300 to kind of limp along. It still picks up only about 75% of the button presses even when I am only 10' away from the antenna. I live in a dense urban area which is prone to a lot of RF interference. For example, I can walk the entire square footage of my condo, and no matter where I place the MRF-300 antenna, it picks up pretty significant interence, even when the sensitivity is tuned to its minimum. Even though these products aren't in the same frequency band, my 802.11b products, bluetooth products, and Somfy shade controllers have no problem.

My guess is that the MX/MRF RF communications protocol is strictly amplitude modulated, so if that's the case, it's no wonder that it is so extremely prone to interference.

So my question is, why not make the next MRF release bluetooth compatible? I already use bluetooth mice and keyboards that are more than 30' from the computer, and they seem pretty robust to interference -- and they probably employ a higher bit rate than what a remote control requires. Furthermore, bluetooth is cheap -- a bluetooth keyboard or mouse goes for under $50, and I'd definitely pay an extra $50 on either end to get a bluetooth savvy MX/MRF product. Not only is bluetooth far more robust to interference than primitive amplitude modulated signals, one can even secure the bluetooth channel to precise device IDs and/or encryption. Finally, with a bluetooth solution the hardware can be greatly simplified because the in-house designed RF hardware could be replaced by commercially available bluetooth modules.

So while I greatly enjoy my MX-950 and feel that an RF feature is the right way to go, I strongly feel that the URC RF solution needs total redesign. It is simply too brittle and prone to interference right now. Users and installers should not need to do the equivalent of backwards somersaults or ask vaunted experts to make the RF portion work.

Thanks, and sorry for the MRF rant.

You should inquire about a new RFX250 antenna for the MRF300, its a new narrow band antenna that less prone to pick up stary RF

I too had many issues with the RF and was to the point where I was totally against URC and MX3000 with a MRF250 or MRF300...we had spent days at a clients home to get it working..all in all in the end we lost hundreds of dollars on the install due to the RF.

Recently I was sent a RFX250 antenna to put in place of the RFX150 that comes with the MRF300 and low and behold...it significantly improved the RF reception..I ran it through its paces where we had issues and all was working..we went from 80-90% to 99.9% and the .1% was probably ue to me pushing the buttons to fast due to my excitment

I was a non URC guy after the RF issues we had on quite a few jobs..most were replaced, converted to IR or dealt with. after I received the RFX250 antenna to use on our worst RF job....Im back to believing URC is working on doing what they can to correct the issues

Thanks for the info; I'll definitely look into getting the 250 antenna. One other thing I noticed about the MRF-300 is that it exhibits a clipping behavior if the remote is near it. In other words if I have the remote within a meter of the receiver, it seems like the receiver gets saturated and is unable to replicate the pulses sent by the remote. This is just another observation of why I feel AM is a bad digital signal encoding scheme.

The bluetooth idea is a very good one. Building in a standard bluetooth module to the remotes in place of the USB/Serial cables would really simplify things and get rid of the cables, which really don't work well with portable devices like remotes.

The bluetooth 2.0 standard is intended for longer range, like a remote to a base unit, for example, and would work very well for that. You could even program the more advanced base units through the same mechanism without removing them from the rack to find the USB port. I have a small bluetooth 2.0 dongle on my server computer upstairs, and it picks up and connects to my cell phone anywhere in the house. It would be a great solution to the whole RF issue, which has been causing URC pains since it first came out.

Has anyone tried directly modifying a 150 to make it more narrowband? It could just be a matter of inserting an LC tank at the feed and tuning that a bit...

Another (minor) reason why bluetooth would be nice: The clock on my MX-950 keeps poor time. It drifts about an hour/week, and the only way to correct the time is to plug it back into the USB and run the editor software. A bluetooth enabled remote would be able to fetch the time from the computer to which it is paired.

As end users we should insist that device manufacturers use established communications standards like bluetooth instead of costly, proprietary (and for the most part primitive and poorly engineered) approaches like is done with URC's RF. This even includes manufacturers like Somfy and Lutron whose decent RF approaches still pale in comparison to what bluetooth can offer.

Bluetooth is nice, but it doesn't work great over longer distance. What I hope will take off is Wi-Fi, which is more robust and is being adopted by Phillips (see the new Pronto at [Link: remotecentral.com]), Thompson and of course the Nevo ([Link: cnet.com]).

wifi does have the distance and it works pretty reliably but the problem here is the reliability of you wifi router, if the network goes down then you have no control. remember wifi routers frequently have firmware upgrades to resolve reliability issues among other things thats why I think that a wifi control is not optimal.

Hm, I don't know how much experience you have with Bluetooth, but I have certainly had more problems with BT than with Wi-Fi (For BT, I have a the older version of the DiNovo ([Link: logitech.com])) as well as the usual car/cell deal.)

I'll go for any well established wi-fi-like standard. The current state of affairs with all these little companies developing their own RF approaches that interfere with one another is for the birds.

In my experience, bluetooth which is nearly ubiquitous today is far more reliable than AM schemes like what is used in the RFX-150 and would offer a vast and extremely cheap improvement over what most (if not all) RF remotes offer today. Keep in mind as well that the bit rate requirements of a remote are extremely small (19200 baud vs a 2MBPs channel), so the bluetooth devices can configured to sacrifice unneeded bandwidth and run in an interference robustness mode. Note that this ***transparently*** includes retransmission of lost packets and correct assembly of packets that might somehow arrive out of order (very unlikely in slow remote control code data transmission scheme).

I am happily running my $59 bluetooth wireless keyboard and wireless mighty mouse 30+ feet away and behind two metal studded walls from where a mac mini is living in the rack with all the other home theater equipment. On the other hand, when the RFX-150 is less than 10' away nd in the clear, it has pretty shoddy performance and is way too prone to interference. As I mentioned, I live in a dense urban area, and background RF is a fact of life that consumer electronics must be robust to. IMHO, most remote control companies have no business designing an RF tx/rx scheme today when what they are putting out is akin to 1980 state of the art. They can save design costs and get better technology in modular wifi technologies available today.