Dakota Alarm BBA-2500 range issues?

[Ericryherd]

I have a BBA-2500 (this is a BBT-2500 3 IR beam solar powered sensors + a DCR-2500 recevier) across my driveway and the receiver is inside my home on a wall that faces the IR sensor RF unit which is about 150' away.
Supposedly the range of the BBT-2500 is 1/2mi.
But I'm not getting reliable triggers.
Most of the time it works - maybe 80%.
Doesn't seem to matter what the weather is or if it's day or night.

When I first setup the system it was more like 50% but I suspect that the batteries needed a little charging in the sun for a couple of days.

I have an everspring door sensor connected to it to convert to ZWave to report to HS. That part is reliable.

The chime is right next to my desk which overlooks the driveway so I can see when someone comes/goes and most of the time the BBT-2500 chimes. But not all the time.

Is there any recommended method of testing the RF range?
Is there an orientation of the unit (either end) that works better than another?

I have the back of the DCR-2500 receiver screwed to a wall that is perpendicular to the sensors and the solar cell is facing away from the house. The DCR-2550 manual recommends horizontal mounting as I have it.
There are only a few thin branches of vegitation between the BBT-2500 and the CSR-2500 receiver so other than the wall of the house it's line-of-sight.

At some point I figure I'll do some trial and error but now that its winter I really don't want to stand out in the cold and keep passing my hand thru the beams.

Overall I like the product a lot. It does not false-detect at all. I just need to get the RF a bit more reliable and then I'd give it 5 stars!

High WAF factor too.

So if anyone knows any tricks to getting the RF to be reliable - please post!

[dschoppe]

Re: Dakota Alarm BBA-2500 range issues?

I tried the BBA-2500 and experienced poor RF range as well, nowhere close to the advertised distance. I returned that unit and instead installed a Dakota BS-KIT MURS. It uses a PIR motion sensor, not a beam break, however it rarely falses in my installation. The system is not solar powered but I've not yet replaced batteries in the past few months that it has been in service. The RF transmitter range is phenomenal.

Cheers,
Don

[Ericryherd]

I did some limited testing yesterday.
Unfortunately it does not appear that there is any sort of diagnostic mode. Ideally you could put the system into a diag mode and the tone frequency of the DCR would change depending on the signal strength coming from the BBT-2500. But no such luck. I have not heard anything back from Dakota Alert after I sumbitted a "contact us" off their web site with a link to the 1st posting on this thread.

The only way to test is to trip the BBT-2500 (walk thru the beams) and listen for the DCR to chime or not. Unfortunately when I was testing, it worked 100% of the time but I know that it does not in normal every day operation.

I did try various orientation of the DCR-2500 and they all seemed about the same except if I pointed the top of the DCR directly at the BBT in which case I got nothing. Makes sense since the top of the DCR antenna is then facing the BBT so it would probably not receive anything.

At the moment I have changed the location of the DCR to be in a window facing the BBT. We'll see if that works better.
When I had to screwed to the wall (about 2' away from the window) it was right next to the outlet that the power supply was plugged into so maybe there is some interference from the wall-wart?