I've looked at old RF posts and didn’t see the answers to a couple of questions. And I can’t find the manual for the 6500 on Philips site to look them up before I buy the 6500.

1)Does the IR emitter on the unit still work when RF is enabled? There is no good place to mount the 6500 in front of my stack so I was going to place it behind and add IR receiver extenders to the critical pieces (not everything has that option so I cant do it for everything). So if it doesn’t I will need to reevaluate the RF extender.
2)Since the plugs on the emitter are the same protocol as the IR input on components, has anyone tried linking them directly?

If anyone has thoughts on the matter I would appreciate any input.

wayne

Even though the manual (compliments of Lyndel McGee) is pertaining to RFX 6000, it should help you with your questions.

[Link: pronto.philips.com]

Yah I had read that document but it didn’t address the questions. On page 6 it talks about multiple IR emitters for multiple areas and states you must use multiple emitters. I can infer that that means the IR is disabled but they don’t specifically say it and can see a scenario where when controlling two rooms you would need two 6000s (which is what that section is mostly about) even if IR still works. I was hoping someone with the unit could say yea or nay.

It also only talks about the supplied IR emitters and not the protocol it uses to communicate IR output. I know I can tape them to the front of units but that looks like crap. Why tape something to the front of my receiver when it has an IR in jack on the back.

I would be amazed if no one has tried it to plug an IR Out jack into an IR in jack directly. I know my Escient does something like that to communicate with disc changers.

I am not sure if this is what you are asking, but I have two RF extenders in my equipment closet. I'm using the second RF extender (set to a different ID) to control a Sony DVP-CX985V DVD Changer which is set to the same codeset as another one of my changers on the first RF extender. When first adding the 2nd RF extender to the mix I just mounted it on the wall right next to the other RF extender in my equipment closet. Upon testing I found that when sending IR codes via RF to the 2nd RF extender both of my DVD changers were still being controlled. This should not have been the case as my RF extenders are set to different ID's. It took me about 10 minutes to realize that these RF extenders were not only sending IR via the IR emitter cables, but were also emitting IR via the front of each unit. This resulted in stray IR being bounced around in my closet, thus causing the problem. I'm also using a Hot Link Pro to feed six components IR via an IR emitter cable from my first RF extender. This complicated things even further as the stray IR was being picked up by my Hot Link Pro's IR receiver. To get the stray IR under control I stapled a cardboard box over the 2nd RF extender and placed the IR receiver (from my Hot Link Pro) stuck to an IR emitter (from my first RF extender) in a small matchbox, then taping the matchbox up to ensure no IR escapes into the closet. Now when sending IR via RF to either RF extender said IR only makes it to my equipment via the supplied IR emitter cables.

sorry for the reuse of the term emitter. If RF is enabled on the pronto 7000 itself, does it still send IR as it would without a rfx6500?

It appears when coding out the remote you can enable devices to be rf or IR. If the system is set to RF, do all units under it default to RF?

Fundamentally i want system wide volume and one component to be controlled by RF and everything else to be IR. That is what i ment by question one.

if that works, then (question 2) i was hoping to not have to place one of the IR emitters that plugs into the 6500 on the face of the escient music server i want controlled by RF. That unit has a plug identical to the one on the 6500 that the IR emmiter plugs into that allows an IR receiver to be remote mounted. That jack is intuitivly called IR In. I was hoping to get a male mono to male mono patch cable to connect the two ports directly.

most of my components have that same remote IR receiver jack on them. Since the 6500 has 4 of those jacks I am hoping to patch several components directly into the 6500.

I actually called escient and described this scenario and they assured me that the male to male patch will allow control, thus completely eliminating the use of IR at any point in the control path.

Hope that clarifies

When RF is enabled for a device, no IR is transmitted for that device. It is one or the other, not both.

You set a Device to be RF. Any IR codes in that Device will then be transmitted using RF. Note that you can still have buttons in that device that have links to IR Codes in other devices. These will still use IR (provided the device linked to is set to IR).

Put your system wide volume code and all the codes for the device you want to control using RF in a device by itself (or in two devices) and set that/those device(s) to RF.

However, if your physical layout permits, you would be better off having everything RF. Then you don't have worry at all which way you point your Pronto.

ok, i think I found out thru the prontoproedit help file.

If the sytem is set to RF then everything is RF but individual devices can be set to RF if you dont want everything to go to RF. I bet if on my system page i have a link to a device that is RF enabled then that command will go via rf. any other links to commands on ir devices will go via IR.

specifically i want to have system wide hard button volume control go via RF. but another hard button (to power everything down) be an IR macro with one rf link. As long as all of these functions are links to rf enabled and unenable devices, i think i can mix and match.

Can someone confirm that that is the case?

Thanks Peter that is exactly what i needed.

sweet thing is that i lurked here for a long time so i read that the best way to do everything is via links. so now all i need to do is togle rf on the unit rather than recode everything.

I suppose now that im registered i should upload my pcf file.