by Benj » Thu Jan 08, 2004 4:28 am
Here's a strange one... have you ever heard of something like this?
I was trying out a new placement of USB-UIRT to see if I can avoid purchasing external emitters. Here's the top to bottom order of components in my rack:
RCA F38310 (38" widescreen tube)
shelf
Kenwood VR-507 receiver
shelf
cable box
VCR
I tried moving the UIRT from on top of the cable box to the top of the Kenwood, because the Kenwood was missing commands some of the time. Suddenly, I started getting nearly constant flashing. (This is with it set up to only flash on receive, not transmit.)
It's night time here. I shut off all lights anyway. I ripped batteries out of all the remotes. I shut off everything in the rack except the HTPC hiding behind the TV. Still flashing! But when I covered the UIRT lens with my hand, the flashing stopped. So there's IR coming from somewhere!
One by one I actually unplugged components, figuring it was the Kenwood somehow. Nope. Finally, I unplugged the TV. Sure enough, the flashing stopped. Plugged it back in, and the flashing started back up. Here's the kicker: it's not coming from the TV's IR lens. If I take the UIRT out and point it at the TV, no flashing. But if I point it at the crack between the TV and the shelf it's on, big time flashing. It's coming out of the bottom of the TV!! And it's leaking through the shelf to the Kenwood below. One more shelf down seems "shielded" enough.
Do you have any idea why an RCA HDTV would be spewing out so much IR from its belly? In the meantime, I guess I'll invest $10 in an external emitter so I can leave the UIRT on top of the cable box... It's not the flashing that's bothersome, seeing as I can disable that. I'm worried that USB-UIRT will be wasting cycles on the constant spurious signal decoding to the point of making real signal handling unreliable.
-Benj