FirM/KAT5 IR/XANTECH/KNOLL

["Frank Mc Alinden" <fmcalind@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All

Firstly apologises for the cross post.........

Recently i posted how i modded FirM to accept modulated ir in and
was successful in getting the KAT5 ir to work.....Decided to try and also
see if i could get xantech and knoll Receivers  to work as well....Thought
it would only be a matter of making an adaptor box ...since KAT5 worked
.....

Made up a cat5 lead with an adaptor box on the end to accept the xantech
3.5mm stereo plug and tried both the xantech and  Knoll Receivers.....Both
worked ok when directly plugged into a FirM RJ45 socket..........Next test
was  to try with approx 200m + of cat5 cable ,and neither worked
;-((........Tried a few different things to get it to work but still no
joy.....

Thought maybe 200m+ of cat5 is a bit much so tried the same cable connected
to one of my systems FirM Receivers and worked fine.....Umm....must be
because FirM uses unmodulated ir i thought...So tried my pair of KAT5
devices...(modulated ir)  and it worked fine (that blew that theory).......

Made a little buffer board .....connected up the xantech receiver and tried
and it worked ;-))
Also tried the Knoll Receiver and it worked as well.......

The knoll receiver requires 12v dc to operate whereas the xantech prefers
to
operate off a regulated 9v supply.....

So looks like its possible to connect xantech + knoll and of course KAT5 to
FirM/Homevision and have a multizone Tx and Rx ir system ..........
Not possible though to have FirM Recievers in the same installation as it
uses unmodulated ir...
But a modulated system could consist of KAT5 IR ,Xantech and Knoll
receivers..........

Kat5 ir out of the 3 devices performed the best IHMO as no additional
buffering was required to work with my FirM hardware (just an adaptor box)
, the xantech receiver IMHO performed  better than the Knoll
Receiver.......

Question : What length  of cat5 runs have people got their xantech ,knoll,
kat5 receivers on..????............I wouldny imagine anything more than 50
metres would be required......

Links

KAT5 IR
http://www.kat5.tv/index1.html

xantech 291-10 Table top receiver
http://www.xantech.com/

Knoll  IR10 Receiver
http://www.knollsystems.com/tech-ir.html

Frank
www.armaghelectrical.com.au