X10 Powermid PM5900 Remote Control Extender Kit - Includes a Transmitter and Receiver - (Infrared Only No Video)

I am totally impressed with this remote control extender. I have used the other types that use an IR receiver and you tape the repeater device on the front of your equipment. They work, but only if you put your electronics in a closed cabinet in the same room. I wanted to get the clutter of my electronics out of the room so that I would only have a wall mounted HDTV in the room with no cables showing. I read the reviews on this Powermid Remote and thought I'd give it a try. My surround sound system, DVR/Cable box, Blu Ray, DVD recorder, and 3rd DVD players are all hidden away in a credenza in a bedroom with an HDMI switch and single HDMI cable that I ran through the wll to the TV set. I was concerned about this working with the equipment closed up in a small cabinet with the face of the equipment very close to the door which practically blocks the IR sensors. I'm happy to say it works flawlessly even in that situation. It even allows me to hook up the DVR and Blu Ray player to my bedroom TV too without paying the extra monthly cost to the cable company. Set up is easy, in fact really nothing to it. Place the transmitter unit in the room you want to sit in, and the receive unit (the one with the antenna), near the equipment to control. They plug in so there's no batteries to worry about. It's that simple. One unit works with all of my remote controls. I've had no trouble with any of the devices I'm controlling. I had to laugh at the reviewer who said the top is sharp and he worried about his kids til I opened the box and touched the top. He was right.. they are sharp. I would not hesitate to buy another one if I needed more. It is extremely good!

This IR remote extender is very easy to install and worked well the first time I tried it. The transmitter is sensitive enough to receive IR signals from remotes at 15 feet. I tried a Harmony One and a Harmony 300i. The reviewers that needed to be within 5 feet to get a signal through might have remotes that don't emit very strong IR signals. The "angle of attack" needs to be pretty close to face-on (remote needs to be fairly well-aimed at the transmitter), and once and a while it will take a second key press to get the signal through. But if you're closer than about 12 feet, it is more forgiving. My receiver is about 45 feet from my transmitter, on a different floor, through several wood-frame walls. Didn't try it at greater distances, but no problem from this far away. The biggest problem I had was aiming the receiver (the unit with the antenna) at the devices. There isn't room in the cabinet to place the receiver in front of the devices, so I had to place it on a shelf about 7 feet away, at about a 45 degree angle from straight-on. Works well from that position. I could use the external LED emitters (I already have a couple from a Sony MRD-D1 video modulator system that I could adapt), but it doesn't seem necessary. The devices are small and unobtrusive, although I agree that the pyramid shape is a little strange. I would prefer something more rectangular which would fit in tight spaces a lot better. The angled front surfaces make it somewhat hard to aim at the best angle to the remotes and devices. But I have to rate this product 5 stars, because it is so easy to install and works so reliably.

I just wanted to throw in my 2 cents. Most of the reviews I have read about the Powermid are where someone put their A/V gear in a closet in the next room or in the basement directly below the living room. These weren't very helpful to me in solving my problem. I want to control my TiVo in the living room from my bedroom. The bedroom is about 45' away from the living room, and there is a right angle in the hallway connecting the two rooms. The radio signal has to penetrate no less than 3 walls to reach the receiver. I read such glowing reviews of the Powermid, I thought I might as well give it a try. It probably couldn't be any worse than the IR/Radio repeater set I paid about 25% more for at Radio Shack. The Radio Shack unit was horribly unreliable, had to be positioned and repositioned and I would have to hold the remote at a funny angle right in front of the transmitter to get it to work. And then it was intermittent at best. The Powermid works flawlessly. I plugged it in, and it just works. Every click works every time. I have the receiver/IR emitter up high on a shelf, not even directly aimed at the TiVo. The transmitter sits across the bedroom from where I have the remote. I think the Powermid's stellar performance is due in part to the reasonably sized antenna on the receiver unit. No visible antenna on the transmitter unit improves the aesthetics. The power supply is via a standard 110-volt cable, no floor slugs or wall warts, and the cords are plenty long.

The manual is minimal to say the least. Just the shortest bit of troubleshooting or FAQ would have been nice. I figured out on my own that the transmitter (and maybe the receiver) is rather sensitive to radio frequency interference. (I've also read that direct sunlight will mess with the infrared side of things.) I have a treadmill on the second floor with a new small Samsung TV sitting on an open wire shelving unit. That is driven by the FIOS DVR on the first floor via an HDMI splitter and a 50 foot HDMI cable from MonoPrice. If I put the transmitter at the lower right corner of the TV, it doesn't work. I moved it down one shelf and put it on a cardboard box, so it is about 12" lower than it was and it works perfectly now. That is most likely due to being away from the TV, but perhaps not sitting in the middle of a wire shelf may also be helping. Downstairs I have a wall mounted TV and a shelf for the FIOS DVR and a Denon A/V amplifier. I have programmed the FIOS Universal Remote control to run everything. (The "Universal" remote has 4 buttons across the top for DVD, AUX, TV, and Set Top Box. They cleverly let you remove the volume function from the TV and assign it to the AUX channel which controls my amp. Only one remote; what a beautiful thing!) I could not find a good place where the Powermid receiver would control all 3 devices other than in the middle of my family room floor. It has to be a few feet back in order to cover them all. So I set it up when I go to exercise and put it away afterwards. I chatted with X10 to learn that the optional extension cable's infrared emitter has a range of 6 feet, which wouldn't help in my case. I have the receiver almost 10' away from the TV/DVR/Amp and it works perfectly every time from there. BTW, you get much faster response from X10 by the site's chat system than the phone. Both the receiver and transmitter have an antenna unlike the image and instructions. Perhaps that have added an antenna to the receiver recently for better performance. With the antenna fully extended the units are just short of 8" tall rather then the 4 3/8" stated. So it works perfectly with the FIOS remote. I like the fact that it does not use batteries. I suspect that makes the transmitter more powerful for one thing. With a better manual or link to a help page, I would have given it 5 stars.

I honestly don't know if what I received was a counterfeit, or if it was genuine and the manufacturer is just sketchy, but the device that I received was definitely not built on the level. Unlike the unit pictured, the one I received had antennas on both the transmitter and receiver. Or it did at one point at least, as the antenna on the receiver had broken off during shipping, because it was only attached with a small dab of hot glue. Better yet, there were no leads running to this antenna, nor were there any holes near its mounting point where leads could have conceivably been run from, just flat plastic. So that antenna never actually did anything in the first place. The devices were packed in a plain white box, with a simple sticker listing the contents. There was no manual or instructions of any kind present. While this isn't exactly a complicated device to set up, one of the devices did have an additional port whose purpose was a mystery. Though given the antenna debacle, I'm not even taking it for granted that it had a purpose. With all that said, I did set it up, mostly out of curiosity. It did actually work with my Denon AV receiver, but not with my comcast set top box.

I don't usually write product reviews and when I do it is to complain about something. However, I felt that I just had to report my experience with this product. It worked exactly as advertised! I placed the transmitter on a bookshelf in my home theater and the receiver on an equipment shelf inside a closed small room when all of my components reside. There were three aspects of the performance of the Powermid that surprised me. First, it is extremely responsive. There is no apparent time lag between pushing a button on the remote and the component response. Second, it was incredibly easy and fast to setup. It took less than five minutes. Third, I didn't have to do anything special in terms of aiming or placement of the receiver. I just placed it on a shelf in the room and all of my components respond. This is probably because my components are in a small room where the IR signal reflects off of the walls and bounces around. If I had to offer any criticism at all it is that you must aim the remote directly at the transmitter. Its reception of the IR signal seems quite narrow. However, this is nit-picking. I really admire the simplicity of this product. The transmitter converts the IR signal into a radio frequency, which can pass through walls, and then the receiver converts it back to IR and sends it to the components. This all happens in a fraction of a second. Compared to some other products I tried and/or investigated, this one is superior by a whole order of magnitude.

I've had these for about a year now and they are just OK. At first they seemed to work really well but all of a sudden i started having intermittent issues getting them to work but i think i might have found a work around. My setup is a theater in my basement with a screen on the wall and a shelf under the screen with my center speaker on it. I placed the receiving powermid beside my center speaker and my components are in a closet that is about 16 feet away angled on the wall to the right of the screen and even with my chairs. The way the closet is there is actually a line of site (sort of) between the powermids so there should be little to no interference (even though these are suppose to work through walls) if i stand in different locations, or if people are in my theater in certain areas it wouldn't work at all. I move the powermids around and find locations where they work better (unacceptable to me for something that is suppose to work through walls) and I came to a possible conclusion: i think the center speaker interferes with it. The farther i moved it away from (my rather large) center speaker the better the performance. I don't know for a fact if this is the fix for it or not, or if it just happens that i've found the perfect location but i don't care to do any more troubleshooting to find out since i've found the sweet spot. I thought it was worth mentioning that in case someone else was having issues. It seems there are a lot of people that love these but my experience has been really spotty. I'm going to continue to use them if they continue to work in my current configuration but they aren't AMAZING like i was expecting.

These X-10 remote extenders work very well. I used them to extend a Time Warner (Samsung) DVR into a bedroom. I used a 50 foot A/V cable and RCA splitters to run the audio and video into the bedroom. Then I used this extender to control the DVR from the bedroom. An LED comes ON in the bedroom pyramid when it receives IR (but no LED indication when the other pyramid re-transmits). Here are several notes: 1) Put the pyramid labeled "transmitter" in the bedroom. This is not intuitive, but it is the RADIO "transmitter", so it goes in the bedroom. 2) An LED comes on in the bedroom pyramid when it detects an IR signal (the Time Warner remote activated the LED). 3) However, the LED did NOT come on for the Dish Network IR remote signal, but the extender still worked, and the Dish Network box was controlled. 4) It extended Sony, JVC, and Panasonic Televisions OK. 5) My girlfriend took the x10 home and set it up, and claimed that it did not work. Why? Because her TV in the bedroom is made of metal, and she blocked the radio signal between the pyramids by putting the TV in-between. Once we moved the bedroom pyramid so there was no "radio shadow" from the TV, the signal went through the sheetrock wall just fine and the system worked fine. 6) The IR sensitivity of the pyramids is fine. The IR receiver worked from over 20 feet (maybe more, I couldn't get further away in that little apartment). Same (a good 20 feet) for the IR transmitter. I did not test the radio sensitivity and distance. 7) The pictures on Amazon do not show wall transformers, however the x10 extender comes with two wall transformers. A little mis-representation here? Still, no complaints.