In article ,
Michael Kennedy wrote:

What do IR signals have to do with RF amplifiers? Light vs Radio waves... I
don't see the connection. Please enlighten me to what you are trying to do.

Some video distribution systems allow for "relayed" IR remote control,
from the viewing point back to the signal source (e.g. from a bedroom
TV, back to a DVR or VCR in the living room).

This generally requires an IR receiver at the viewing location, whose
output is then modulated onto a low-level RF signal that is mixed onto
the video distribution coax. At the "sending" end of the video signal
(e.g. living room) the RF signal is tapped out of the coax,
demodulated into a baseband signal, and used to drive an IR LED which
then is "seen" by the remote-control receiver on the device being
controlled. [A somewhat similar trick is used by the infamous X-10
"black pyramid" IR repeater systems, which do a similar IR-RF-IR
repeating trick over the air (and are so prone to pick up RF
interference that they don't work very well and can even block in-room
IR control signals).]

If you try to use this system with an RF distribution amplifier
in-line, it may or may not work, depending on the design of the
distribution amplifier. A simple "downstream-only" RF amplifier (e.g.
one based on a simple MMIC circuit) is likely to have rather high
rejection in the reverse direction - the modulated RF signal from the
IR repeater's receiver will be blocked when it hits the output of the
amp, and won't continue to travel back "upstream" to the source.

Whether it would work, would depend on several things, including the
specific RF frequency being used for IR repeating, and whether the
distribution amp has some sort of "bypass" circuit which allows this
particular frequency to "flow around" the amplifier without being
blocked (or amplified and fed back downstream, which would create a
feedback loop that would surely result in oscillation).

I'd guess that you'd need to buy an IR repeating system, and
amplifier, which were specifically designed to work together in this
way. Most off-the-shelf distribution amps are unidirectional and
probably do not have any sort of duplexing "bypass" circuit in their
design.

--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
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