I find that with a lot of the technological devices they’ve come up with in the last few years, the unit’s not powerful enough to reach its full potential. Take, for example, the garage door opener. How embarrassing and time-consuming it is for you to have to come all the way up your driveway, pressing on the remote button as you try to get into the garage before the police come around the corner. Wouldn’t it be great if that remote would work from, say, half a mile away?
I can feel your smile. Well, here’s how to do it. Take the remote apart and look at the circuit board. Half of the stuff is there to generate an RF signal and the other half transmits that signal through the air to the garage door sensor. You want to replace that second part, so you need to break into the circuit just before the transmitter so that you can redirect the RF signal to the input side of a 5,000-watt ham radio amplifier. You can pick up a used one pretty cheap from any wife who’s tired of her husband spending every available minute down in the basement twirling knobs.
Now that you’ve radically boosted the signal, you’ll need an upgrade on the transmitting antenna. I suggest you use an old TV aerial. You can pick them up at garage sales or in trailer parks after a tornado has gone through. Mount the antenna on a swivel bracket on your back bumper as pictured.
That way, you can use the rope to lower the antenna for bridges and tunnels.
Now you’re good to go. From now on, as long as you’re in sight of your garage door, you’ll be able to open it. It’s important that your garage door works on a different frequency than any of your neighbours’, unless they’re away and you need to borrow something.
The power question arises again when you sit down to watch an evening of football, baseball, basketball and hockey and the remote either doesn’t work at all or is intermittent no matter how much you bang it on the arm of the recliner or take off the back and spin the batteries. It’s a similar problem to the garage door opener, but it’s a different technology, so it requires a different solution. The TV remote uses an IR (Infrared) signal, so an RF amplifier won’t work. What you need is a military-grade laser gun. They’re tricky to find. If you end up buying one on the Internet, you should use an untraceable post-office box as your address.
As you did with the garage door remote, you need to open this one up and connect from the signal-generating circuit directly into the beam accelerator on the gun. Duct-tape the trigger on the gun so it’s on all the time and only activated when the remote buttons are pushed. You will now be able to change channels easily from anywhere in the room, even in full recline. Just make sure there is nobody between you and the TV, or they soon won’t be. (If you’re concerned about the legality of this device, it also makes an excellent gift.)