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Copyright © 1998 by Woody Liswood. All Rights Reserved
Would you like to view your PC on your TV screen?
Imagine this. You recline in your entertainment room, your favorite beverage in your hand, watching your new DVD formatted movie showing on your DVD drive situated in your PC located about 50 feet away in the back of your house in your home office. On your lap sits a small portable keyboard that lets you control everything from there. Does that sound like the world of 2001? Well, buddy, the future is now.
PC@TV from RF-LINK Technology does it all. Anything that appears on your monitor can be shown on your home television. Using Radio Frequency technology, you do not need to run wires from the computer to the TV, just let the RF transmitter and the RF receiver do all the work.
The hardest part is to assemble everything. There are 17 things that must go together. There are different cables, transmitters, power supplies, and adapters that you need to fool with to get things up and running. The documentation shows pictures of everything.
You must (or should have) extra video in and left and right channel in ports on your TV. If not, maybe you can run this setup through your VCR. At your TV, you place the RF receiver, and adjust an antenna to point at the direction your PC signal will come from. That,s the easy part.
At your PC, you insert their keyboard transmitter between your PC keyboard and the keyboard connector in your computer. Then you place a RF link into your video cabling. You then hook up the right and left channels from your sound card to the RF transmitter. Everything plugs together. Next set your video monitor to 640 by 480 resolution and 60 Hz refresh rate, turn on everything, and what you do on your PC is transmitted to and displayed on your home TV.
Everything worked out of the box, but I did manage to connect the video scan converter in backwards so I did not have a picture, anywhere, when I started. A quick call to tech support (they returned my call) and some guesswork solved that problem. It turns out that the RF-LINK folks assumed that every monitor had a hard-wired video cable. Mine uses a portable cable so I managed to connect the link backward. NO problem, but I suspect they will change their documentation the next time it is printed.
All this hardware comes with Living Room Active software. This software, combined with the wireless keyboard, lets you run your computer from a distance. It provides for a better-looking image on your TV that has the correct proportions for viewing the PC generated screen on the TV. Living Room Active runs your PC, surfs the Internet and manages audio or DVD CD,s. I found the interface cutesy and sophomoric, but it worked with no problems.
The only anomaly I found was that if I close to and in front of either the RF transmitter or the RF receiver the picture on the TV screen broke up slightly.
RF-Link Technology, Inc.
411 Amapola Avenue
Torrance, CA 90501
(310) 787-2328
Price - $499.