I think I know the answer...

[James Sentman]

On Sep 14, 2014, at 12:21 PM,  Jerry — MacSolutions <jerry at stlmacguy.com> wrote:

> I think I know the answer to this but I thought that I’d throw it out before I spent money.  :)
> 
> I have a W800 receiver about 30ft from my HA machine.  Currently, I have a USB to Serial adapter — with a serial cable running about 3ft to the w800 — And a coaxial cable running to the antenna about 30 ft away.
> 
> Will I get any better reception if I were to replace the 30 ft of coax with a serial cable, placing the W800 receiver directly or close being connect to the antenna?  
> 
> I seem to be right at the maximum range for my outdoor motion sensors and once in a while, when the atmospherics are bad, I miss some signals.
> 

And the answer is a strong maybe ;) it certainly wont hurt the serial signals to run that far anyway. Many is the Serial cable I've cut in the middle and spliced in some cat-5 to get it further away from the computer!

Another option is to add an antenna amplifier. The 430ish frequency of the X10 signals is well within the range of most TV/FM coax signal booster antennas. The absolute best results I"ve gotten are from radio shacks inline amp. You inject power in at the receiver with an attachment and the amp goes right underneath the antenna being powered through the coax. They dont seem to make these anymore unfortunately. I see a lot of radio amps for car applications that I'm definitely going to experiment with in the future, but any TV amp might work if the frequency is right. They dont always work, and turning them up all the way sometimes just amplifies the noise, but other times I've had great results with them.

The absolute best solution is to just get a second W800 and put them at opposite ends of the house, though that would be spending more money ;) The next version of XTension will allow you to assign units with the same address and type across multiple interfaces for reception making having many receivers for the same device type easier.

Thanks,
 	James


James Sentman                       http://sentman.com		http://MacHomeAutomation.com