Re: Insteon Review

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

Ralph <no-spam@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

>If your RF range is only a few feet, you've probably got some 900MHz
>interference. I had exactly that problem and changed the "channel" on
>the interfering equipment and now have no RF issues. It's a design error
>that Insteon can't change it's frequency or do spread spectrum. OTOH, it
>seems to me that the whole RF coupling is not a big deal, why not just
>use a wired bridge?

I didn't see your last sentence the first time around.

I suspect the RF coupling serves two purposes. One is it lets them call it
dual band and infers that its better than Z-Wave, Zigbee, or X-10 which are
single band. The other is that its probably easier to manage the phase
coupling/repeating this way given that individual units all repeat signals,
too. Dan Boone (Ocelot, etc.) told me that incidental coupling between
phases made powerline CE-Bus unworkable.

The documentation that SmartHome released yesterday is helpful. It verifies
several things which I had inferred from my experiments with the starter
kit, answers a few questions I still had (e.g. max repeats) and gives a
fairly good overview of the system. Despite the marketing hype, it appears
that the RF is intended only as a phase bridge/repeater or as RF-only input
devices (i.e. remotes). I think the typical castle being built these days
will require multiple RF receivers to overcome range limitations.