I found the root cause of most of my IR troubles. Yes, the FIOS HD box is picky, blinking LED's weak, long cable runs bad, but the real killer was I also had a RF repeater TR-8100 in the mix. It seemed to work fine by itself, seemed to work well enough when I added the main room repeater from Xantech, but with the FIOS box nothing worked when it's external LED was in the same cabinet as the others. Out came the scope. It is putting out an endless stream of spurious pulses. It seems it is overly sensitive to RF garbage in the air and responds to it, even if the transmitter is off. These pulses mess up the codes from the other devices and explains why you have to hit buttons several times even when it is by itself. It seems the FIOS HD box is more sensitive to this garbage than the old standard box, or the Dish box I used for years. These units made by JEBSEE have no specs to know what RF frequency they use. They are sold under many house brands, mine says My-TV on it. I hard-wired a second Xantech unit and now everything is rock solid.

In my experience, most ASK/OOK remote receivers have their data slicers tuned to very near the receivers noise threshold to maximize range. Some track the data slicer threshold to average noise via the receivers AGC, however, impulse noise often gets through resulting in the type of spurious 'blasts' you see.

In many cases the cause of RF noise is a cable box or satellite receiver. If you can move your remote receiver away from this type of device, you can usually improve your reliability of RF IR signal reception. Attenuating the RF signal by removing the antenna of the receiver can also help, although this usually reduces range.

Jonathan

Your analysis is likely correct. I tried turning everything off in the house one by one. Router, phones, etc. Actually cut power to all but a couple of branches. The interference seems to be external to my house. Whatever the source, it is over 60 feet away. Root problem, the device is too simple for the intended use. Our environments are just too polluted. It might not have been when the unit was first designed.

I completed a hard-wire setup, and am now reliable. Old school, if it does not move, cable it. Fortunately, I have a single floor house so I have full attic access. If I had to resort to RF again, I would hope other brands have put the effort in the receiver not to cause these problems. After all, you can buy a 3 station hands-free phone setup for less than the 8100 cost.