Problems getting your video sender to work?

In this article we are covering video sender setup tips & tricks to ensure that your set up is correct so that your video sender works.

Sometimes we find customers have issues with getting a video sender to work and very often this is just a small mistake made during the set up process. Because there is very little to set up the obvious mistakes are the easy ones to make.

If you have set up your video sender and have absolutely no reception in your secondary room work through this brief article and you should be able to confirm whether the issue is being caused by a set up issue or whether there is a problem with your unit.

Firstly … and probably the most common mistake made when setting up video senders… is with regards to the Scart cables that connect from the video senders transmitter to your set top box and from the video senders receiver to your secondary TV. These cables are usually labelled “Transmitter” and “Receiver”… these cables usually cannot be mixed up… if the cable labelled as “Transmitter” is plugged in to the video senders unit marked as “Receiver” your video sender will almost certainly simply not function at all. So check your cables are used with the right unit.

Next is to check the channels used. Video senders have several channels that they can operate on controlled usually by a switch on the back of the transmitter and receiver unit. This is very useful if you are finding that there is some interference from some other device in your local vicinity so this allows you to turn the video sender to a slight variant of the frequency that your sender uses to avoid that interference. It is very important to ensure that both transmitter and receiver from your video sender are both switched to the same channel… if they aren’t then you will not get any reception at all… so this is very important!

Next ensure that the socket that the video sender transmitter unit is plugged in to on your Sky / cable set top box is outputting audio and video … best way to test this is to plug the video sender transmitter in to the socket that you are currently using for your TV connection and the TV in to the socket that the transmitter was plugged in to. Sometimes you may find that on some Sky and other set top boxes a Scart socket can be switched on and off in the set top box settings and if currently switched off no audio and video will be output from that socket and thus you will get no audio and video in your secondary room.

Check that the Scart connector jack is fully pushed in to the rear of both the sender and receiver as some times these sockets can be tight and if not correctly / fully pushed in you will get no signal… we have seen this issue several times before.

Lastly on the receiving TV do ensure that you change the TV over to the correct channel for the Scart socket i.e. this is using normally a button on the remote labelled as “AV” or “Source”.

Video sender transmission distance

Every wall, floor and obstacle that sits in between the transmitter and receiver will substantially decrease the possible transmission distance for your unit. If you think it could be this that is causing a transmission issue then the best test is to have the transmitter and receiver in the same room initially and set up the system so that you know all is working and there are no set up issues before taking distance and obstacles in to account.

There is no hard and fast rule to say that a certain model of video sender can have between the transmitter and receiver as number of obstacles the signal must travel through affects possible distance as does the density of those obstacles i.e. a stud wall is easier for a signal to travel through compared to an old thick stone wall. Further more other factors less easily seen can and will affect your sender such as other wireless traffic causing interference can very likely reduce transmission distance too.

Do get in touch and let the 3wisemonkeys know if you need any more information or tips!

The 3wisemonkeys team