Hi to the group, just joined, because today I had what can only be described as an epiphany, and I need to share it with you!

We are on PVR number 5 (over the space of 2 years), all of them the DVR530, and I do not intend to use this thread as an opportunity to rant about the quality of the PVR. I think we all know it is questionable. Units 1 to 3 died when their processors fried for no good reason. Number 4 would not receive any messages from the remote. Number 5 is ok so far.

Our PVR is about 80 feet away from our bedroom, and it is the bedroom where we make most use of it. It sits in our main TV room and feeds our plasma screen with HD occasionally. We feed some other screen in our house via the coax cables which are distributed through the house; we merely feed this cable system from the coax out connection on the back of the PVR.

The remote is ultrasonic (I think) and is supposed to be able to send its signal for 100's of feet. Our previous units actually achieved this quite well until their brains failed. Anyway number 5 unit has all kinds of problems. And we need to be able to operate it easily from our bedroom (ok you guessed it we record Coronation Street on Sunday morning and then watch it in bed with breakfast during the week). So for the last few weeks it has been very annoying trying to get the thing to accept signals from 80 feet away. I think as they "improve" the units they downgrade the quality of the remote circuitry as a bonus.

So today I had that epiphany: it occurred to me to grab a roll of spare copper wire from the workshop, bare a little at one end and wrap it around the little aerial on the back of the PVR, and run it through the house into the bedroom. Hey presto, the remote worked perfectly.

So now I have run that same piece of wire up into the roof space above the PVR, and right across the house to the point where it is draped over our bedroom ceiling just begging to receive our requests for fast forward and rewind. And I am really happy about it.

So just in case you are wondering, the way around the remote reception problem is not to bring the aerial to the remote.

cheers!:p

Sorry, that last line should have read:

"So just in case you are wondering, the way around the remote reception problem IS to bring the aerial to the remote."

You got hundreds of feet? I've never got more than 15 feet out of ours. Seriously, it barely works in the same living room as the receiver. We complained about it and they said that's normal.

It's UHF by the way, radio frequency, not ultrasonic.

I am not surprised to hear Starchoice shrugged off your complaint by saying that was "normal". The only thing "normal" is that the Starchoice tech support people you get on the phone tend to know NOTHING about the intricacies of the PVR they sell. They start off by saying they know everything and only after you have wasted another 20 minutes or so of your life do they actually wake up and pass you along to another "expert" who knows only slightly more.

I do laugh when I occasionally see that advert on TV where the top guy at Starchoice stands in front of a crowd of his employees and tells us he is there to do everything we need. It is a joke, and the problem lies with the equipment.

Thanks for putting me right on the UHF thing, I knew that at one point in this saga, just forgot it.

Incidentally we use one of the Harmony remotes in our main TV room (where the PVR resides) and it has no problem whatsoever controlling the unit, because I think there is an infra-red receiver on the front of the PVR.

Perhaps you should try that, it would make your life less frustrating.

Back to the UHF remote having problems sending from 15 feet, what do you expect? You only paid about $600 for the PVR!

cheers

Starchoice does seem bad at times, but we had bell express view for years before that from the late '90s to 2005 and I can tell you from experience they were much worse. So bad in fact that when it came time to go HD we decided we would ditch Bell just for the sheer fact of their terrible customer service alone.

We're seriously considering going to cable with all the trouble we've had with the flakey 530 since day one.

I look at all you can do with a Tivo these days and it makes the sat boxes look pretty old fashioned.

I have never been a customer of Bell for TV signals, and will never be I expect, after the appalling experience I had a few years ago when I was paying for their so-called broadband internet service. I will soon have Bell entirely out of our house when I switch to another telephone provider.

In defence of Starchoice, I have reason to believe that Rogers Digital cannot compete with the quality of the Starchoice satelite signal. I have seen Rogers in action, and it does not measure up.

We have considered switching over to Rogers (we already use them for broadband and it is largely flawless) but the outlay of money to do so would make it painful. The existence of the UHF reciver on the PVR allows us to share one tuner across the house. Rogers does not offer this as far as I know, and neither does Bell for that matter.

One techie I spoke to at Starchoice defended their 530 by saying it is light-years ahead of the competition. The problem with this is that it is taking light-years for the bugs to be ironed out.

Someone should be getting the boot over at Motorola I reckon.

cheers