- Sep 27, 2019
- 9
- 1
Thanks guys! So out of the three you’d recommend the inkbird due to the four probes?
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- Sep 27, 2019
- 9
- 1
I would lean towards the Inkbird model I posted for the 4 probes (3 are hybrid probes for meat or rack level, and 1 is a rack level probe only).
Depending on your surrounding structures RF may have to be your go to since steel/concrete block more signal. I've had my Soraken several years and it's a six port BT that came with 4 probes. I've never lost reception mowing the yard/walking down the street 150'+ away and no instructions needed for the phone app. I recently picked up two new probes for $12 for filling all six ports. It's the best therm I've ever used for around $38 after promo code. I got it for $21.03 after throwing cash back bonus $ at it. I like alkaline batteries vs. rechargeable because all batteries fail. So I prefer to replace dead alkaline batteries and they work great in cold temps. I just replaced the two AA batteries after three years of heavy use.
Can somebody explain to me why these digital Therms have trouble with dropping when walls or steel doors get in the way.
Yet when I tested my first MES 40 with RF Remote:
In every room in my house, thru up to 4 walls.
In my garage, thru 3 walls.
My Recliner, thru 2 walls & a Steel front door.
On my rear deck, completely on the other side of the house---5 walls.
Out front at my Mailbox---About 300' of open space.
Everything on that remote worked good at all those places, all the time.
I would think the coverage with a digital wireless set of Therms would be more important than coverage with a Smoker.
Bear
Yet when I tested my first MES 40 with RF Remote:
In every room in my house, thru up to 4 walls.
In my garage, thru 3 walls.
My Recliner, thru 2 walls & a Steel front door.
On my rear deck, completely on the other side of the house---5 walls.
Out front at my Mailbox---About 300' of open space.
Everything on that remote worked good at all those places, all the time.
I would think the coverage with a digital wireless set of Therms would be more important than coverage with a Smoker.
Bear
I'm by no means an expert on any of this but I think a lot of it has to due with the technology and therefore the frequency being used.
With equipment and environmental factors being the same, the higher the radio frequency the lower the range.
Bluetooth uses a higher 2.4GHZ frequency (gigahertz are > megahertz) so it's range is not so far.
RF (non-bluetooth) is likely to be in the lower 900MHZ frequency range so it goes further.
Bluetooth is a standardized cookie cutter approach making life simpler for everyone to play along with little to no deviation from the standard and capabilities where RF devices can be as proprietary/custom as needed for their application.
This means that with Bluetooth you get what you get within the standardized specs.
With RF you can tailor the crap out of it to work however you want it to work.
Bluetooth being standardized is fast to bring to reality and cheap.
RF designs that get super custom can take longer to bring into reality and cost a lot more money for design since it's being tailored to it's application.
With all of this said your Bluetooth or Wifi or other devices in the 2.4GHZ or higher ranges will give less distance and go through fewer reasonable obstacles than a lower frequency RF device that may have been tailored to behave better with data packet design and delivery etc. than the other options.
Hopefully someone with a good radio frequency and technology background can clean up anything I have misstated here but this is my understanding of it all :)
Maybe I wasn't clear with my question.
Bluetooth wasn't in my mind, because I have nothing to go with it anyway. So lets forget about Bluetooth for this instance.
My question is why are all of my MES RF Remotes much better than any wireless remotes I've seen on Therms?
I would think getting good coverage would be more important to the Therms than to a Big box built to smoke meat in.
Bear
Bluetooth wasn't in my mind, because I have nothing to go with it anyway. So lets forget about Bluetooth for this instance.
My question is why are all of my MES RF Remotes much better than any wireless remotes I've seen on Therms?
I would think getting good coverage would be more important to the Therms than to a Big box built to smoke meat in.
Bear
I wish I had a definite answer. My best guess is that Masterbuilt actually picked a good frequency and design for the kind of data they have to transmit from the MES to the remote.
I'm guessing the crappy thermometers are trying to piggy back off an existing RF design which doesn't suit their product behavior well BUT was cheap to buy and easy to put in place and manufacture.
All speculation though hahaha :D
First, Bear: The window in your smoker is way too clean! ;)
Next: You can design and build a radio frequency remote system any way you want. So the frequency used, data signaling method, power levels, antennas, RF sensitivity of the receivers, and modulation modes can be whatever you want them to be (theoretically within what is allowed by FCC regulations). Although, a lot of these foreign-made units may well technically be operating illegally, and NOT be FCC type-accepted.
The frequency used will have a large effect on how the signals propagate. When us "hams" want to talk very long distances, we use lower frequencies that will actually bounce off of the ionosphere in the upper atmosphere of the earth, and also bounce off of the earth itself. The effect is that the radio waves bounce up and down, and can go completely around the world this way, even though there's no straight-line path between the two points. This is sometimes referred to as "skip", or "working the skip".
On the other hand, higher frequency RF signals will pass right through the ionosphere. And the ionosphere is always changing, depending on, among other things, how well excited it is by the solar wind, etc.
If the ionosphere is highly ionized, it becomes more electrically conductive, and makes a better reflector. The so-called MUF or "maximum useable frequency" will go up, so even higher frequency signals will bounce off.
Remember the CB radio craze of the 1970s? This corresponded with one of the 11 year solar maximums, when there were a LOT of sunspots, and correspondingly, a lot of high speed solar wind striking the earth, and exciting the ionosphere. Hence, the ionosphere was very reflective, and even CB radio signals at around 27 Megahertz bounced rather than penetrating the ionosphere.
So people could "work the skip" even with a cheap CB rig, and potentially talk around the world on them. Normally, this would not be the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
https://www.hfpropagation.com/
The sun is now in a very inactive phase. The lack of sunspots correlates directly with the amount of energy it releases, and this is the REAL driver of earth temperatures. CO2 concentrations are a red herring, but that's another story.
Anyhow, different frequencies also tend to penetrate different structures better or worse.
Higher transmitter power goes farther.
Better receiver design improves reception by having higher sensitivity.
Better antenna design helps both transmitting and receiving.
Different modulation schemes can be more or less forgiving of noise in the received signal. Different data encoding modes can be more tolerant of data errors. Better data error detection and correction schemes can cover for bad reception.
And a scheme called "spread spectrum" can give you 60dB or more "conversion gain" at the receiving end. (60 dB is a one million times increase in power level). Things like our GPS system use spread spectrum communication to allow a tiny, low power transmitter on a satellite 22,000 miles away to cover a whole continent while a tiny antenna in a cell phone or other gadget reliably receives its incredibly weak signal, buried 50dB below the noise floor.
Spread spectrum communication was at least partially invented by the actress Hedy Lamar, interestingly enough. That's an amazing story. She was Brilliant, but not well appreciated in her time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Where I worked many years ago, we built our own modems to use with radio or telephone links to communicate telemetry data. These modems worked so well that they were reliable even with extremely bad signal to noise ratios. We had a telemetry system for a municipal water department. One site worked perfectly as far as the customer was concerned. But when we checked its data logs, we could see that it was missing some transmissions, and had to re-try occasionally. This was invisible to the user, because it still got the job done with no errors.
But we looked into it. After going back and forth with the local phone company, we located a bad phone line using a time domain reflectometer, and had them excavate the approximate location of the fault. They were pissed, and insisted there was no issue with their lines, and we were going to have to pay their exorbitant rates ($180 per hour for each of the workers) to do the job if our assessment turned out to be wrong).
When they dug the line up, it turned out that our telemetry had been successfully talking over a phone line with one of it's two conductors completely separated. The customer never had a problem, but we knew things weren't right, and wanted the root cause corrected.
Anyhow, the point is that with good modem design and good error detection and correction, and a robust control logic, even a crappy signal path can work well!
Back then, the company I worked for was called upon to do some repair and maintenance work for the USDA's system of "snotel" sites. These sites are located all over the western US (at least), and report the snow depth, snow water equivalent, etc., from these locations so that they can estimate the amount of water held in various watersheds and predict how reservoirs will need to be managed to deal with more or less runoff for the "water year" for agriculture, power generation, etc.
Anyhow, these sites communicate using a very interesting technique. They bounce radio signals off of the ionized trails left in the atmosphere by meteors!
That's right. They rely on finding a temporary radio path created by the reflection of radio waves off of the path of ionized air caused by a meteor! It sounds bizarre and unbelievable, but the system makes it work.
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/factpub/sntlfct1.html
Anyhow, there are so many variables here. Suffice it to say that a well designed radio data transmission system will work well, and a crappy one won't! :)
Next: You can design and build a radio frequency remote system any way you want. So the frequency used, data signaling method, power levels, antennas, RF sensitivity of the receivers, and modulation modes can be whatever you want them to be (theoretically within what is allowed by FCC regulations). Although, a lot of these foreign-made units may well technically be operating illegally, and NOT be FCC type-accepted.
The frequency used will have a large effect on how the signals propagate. When us "hams" want to talk very long distances, we use lower frequencies that will actually bounce off of the ionosphere in the upper atmosphere of the earth, and also bounce off of the earth itself. The effect is that the radio waves bounce up and down, and can go completely around the world this way, even though there's no straight-line path between the two points. This is sometimes referred to as "skip", or "working the skip".
On the other hand, higher frequency RF signals will pass right through the ionosphere. And the ionosphere is always changing, depending on, among other things, how well excited it is by the solar wind, etc.
If the ionosphere is highly ionized, it becomes more electrically conductive, and makes a better reflector. The so-called MUF or "maximum useable frequency" will go up, so even higher frequency signals will bounce off.
Remember the CB radio craze of the 1970s? This corresponded with one of the 11 year solar maximums, when there were a LOT of sunspots, and correspondingly, a lot of high speed solar wind striking the earth, and exciting the ionosphere. Hence, the ionosphere was very reflective, and even CB radio signals at around 27 Megahertz bounced rather than penetrating the ionosphere.
So people could "work the skip" even with a cheap CB rig, and potentially talk around the world on them. Normally, this would not be the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
https://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
https://www.hfpropagation.com/
The sun is now in a very inactive phase. The lack of sunspots correlates directly with the amount of energy it releases, and this is the REAL driver of earth temperatures. CO2 concentrations are a red herring, but that's another story.
Anyhow, different frequencies also tend to penetrate different structures better or worse.
Higher transmitter power goes farther.
Better receiver design improves reception by having higher sensitivity.
Better antenna design helps both transmitting and receiving.
Different modulation schemes can be more or less forgiving of noise in the received signal. Different data encoding modes can be more tolerant of data errors. Better data error detection and correction schemes can cover for bad reception.
And a scheme called "spread spectrum" can give you 60dB or more "conversion gain" at the receiving end. (60 dB is a one million times increase in power level). Things like our GPS system use spread spectrum communication to allow a tiny, low power transmitter on a satellite 22,000 miles away to cover a whole continent while a tiny antenna in a cell phone or other gadget reliably receives its incredibly weak signal, buried 50dB below the noise floor.
Spread spectrum communication was at least partially invented by the actress Hedy Lamar, interestingly enough. That's an amazing story. She was Brilliant, but not well appreciated in her time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_spectrum
Where I worked many years ago, we built our own modems to use with radio or telephone links to communicate telemetry data. These modems worked so well that they were reliable even with extremely bad signal to noise ratios. We had a telemetry system for a municipal water department. One site worked perfectly as far as the customer was concerned. But when we checked its data logs, we could see that it was missing some transmissions, and had to re-try occasionally. This was invisible to the user, because it still got the job done with no errors.
But we looked into it. After going back and forth with the local phone company, we located a bad phone line using a time domain reflectometer, and had them excavate the approximate location of the fault. They were pissed, and insisted there was no issue with their lines, and we were going to have to pay their exorbitant rates ($180 per hour for each of the workers) to do the job if our assessment turned out to be wrong).
When they dug the line up, it turned out that our telemetry had been successfully talking over a phone line with one of it's two conductors completely separated. The customer never had a problem, but we knew things weren't right, and wanted the root cause corrected.
Anyhow, the point is that with good modem design and good error detection and correction, and a robust control logic, even a crappy signal path can work well!
Back then, the company I worked for was called upon to do some repair and maintenance work for the USDA's system of "snotel" sites. These sites are located all over the western US (at least), and report the snow depth, snow water equivalent, etc., from these locations so that they can estimate the amount of water held in various watersheds and predict how reservoirs will need to be managed to deal with more or less runoff for the "water year" for agriculture, power generation, etc.
Anyhow, these sites communicate using a very interesting technique. They bounce radio signals off of the ionized trails left in the atmosphere by meteors!
That's right. They rely on finding a temporary radio path created by the reflection of radio waves off of the path of ionized air caused by a meteor! It sounds bizarre and unbelievable, but the system makes it work.
https://www.wcc.nrcs.usda.gov/factpub/sntlfct1.html
Anyhow, there are so many variables here. Suffice it to say that a well designed radio data transmission system will work well, and a crappy one won't! :)
Last edited:
Sigmo,
Thank You for the interesting Reading---Way over my head, but still interesting.
I believe my Son knows about some similar type things, through his Cellphone/Tower Corporation. He used to deal with from 1/2" to 2 1/2" Coax, but now most of it is Fiber Optics. He used to do a lot of "Sweep Tests" on the Coax, with "Wiltron" from Anritsu (sp). You could have a small dent in a line, and that test would find it & tell you exactly where it was in the line (to the inch). If it was close to one end, they could use a longer jumper cable, but if it wasn't, they'd have to run a whole new line. My Son shocked me how he knew so much about that stuff right away when he started his company, since like me he graduated in Cabinetmaking at the Tech School. Then about a year of being a Tower Monkey, and he started his own Business. Sprint called him to a job in his first week (19 years ago), because a Cell site was down, and there were 4 college boys running around totally lost. He left the job he was on & drove 3 hours to get there, 10 minutes there to fix it, and 3 hours to home. He used to have 13 employees, but he changed around, and now he only has 5 Employees, but they just Sub most of the Jobs out, and they oversee the jobs.
However, like I said it's all over my head, and when I worked for him I did things I could handle, like shoot the Azimuths for each antenna, Honcho Antenna swaps, adjust down tilts, do Tower inventories, and mostly keep the crazy tower monkeys out of trouble on the jobs.
Bear
Thank You for the interesting Reading---Way over my head, but still interesting.
I believe my Son knows about some similar type things, through his Cellphone/Tower Corporation. He used to deal with from 1/2" to 2 1/2" Coax, but now most of it is Fiber Optics. He used to do a lot of "Sweep Tests" on the Coax, with "Wiltron" from Anritsu (sp). You could have a small dent in a line, and that test would find it & tell you exactly where it was in the line (to the inch). If it was close to one end, they could use a longer jumper cable, but if it wasn't, they'd have to run a whole new line. My Son shocked me how he knew so much about that stuff right away when he started his company, since like me he graduated in Cabinetmaking at the Tech School. Then about a year of being a Tower Monkey, and he started his own Business. Sprint called him to a job in his first week (19 years ago), because a Cell site was down, and there were 4 college boys running around totally lost. He left the job he was on & drove 3 hours to get there, 10 minutes there to fix it, and 3 hours to home. He used to have 13 employees, but he changed around, and now he only has 5 Employees, but they just Sub most of the Jobs out, and they oversee the jobs.
However, like I said it's all over my head, and when I worked for him I did things I could handle, like shoot the Azimuths for each antenna, Honcho Antenna swaps, adjust down tilts, do Tower inventories, and mostly keep the crazy tower monkeys out of trouble on the jobs.
Bear
Bear:
It sounds like you've been involved with a lot of this sort of thing yourself. :)
Those large heliax cables are expensive, so when someone has to replace a long stretch of it, it makes them very unhappy! ;)
Cell phone coverage isn't very common out in the boonies. So there are a lot of areas that still have no coverage around here. And before cell phones were around, we put in some radio systems to allow oil drilling companies to communicate from well drilling sites to their main offices located in various towns.
Since these guys, for some reason, didn't want to use a normal radio system, but wanted this to seem like a telephone to them, we designed and built a number of these odd gadgets that behaved like a telephone from their point of view, but operated using modified mobile radios at each end. We separated the transmit from the receive and installed big cavity duplexers to allow them to transmit and receive at the same time so that the system seemed like a regular telephone (full duplex) so you could hear the other guy while you were talking.
Of course, ordinary radio is half-duplex. You can't hear the other guy while you're transmitting, and vice versa. For whatever reason, this was "beneath" these hot-shots!
So anyhow, these gadgets got installed at their drilling locations, and we put antennas up on their drilling rigs, aimed at the town they were trying to "hit".
Since this was reasonably high frequency stuff (450 Mhz band), and the antennas were far up on the tops of the drill rigs, we used heliax to connect the radio gadgets to the antennas.
Every single time these folks moved a rig, they failed to call us, and failed to take the heliax down properly. They'd just fold it up in big kinked wads. Then they'd call us to set things up at their new location, and we got to sell them a new run of heliax every single time! Then they'd sqwak about the price of the stuff. So we'd explain how delicate it is, and how you need to be very careful and not kink it or bend it at too small of a radius, etc. Then they'd wreck it again the next time they moved the rig! It was hilarious to us, but they never ever figured it out.
The gadgets worked well. A "cell phone" before such a thing existed. Of course, they put out 100 Watts continuously the whole time they were on the "phone" jawboning to the office. We had to buy special high melting point solder to solder the power transistors to the circuit boards in the radios because they got so hot that they melted the solder on their tabs and disconnected themselves! But I never saw a single one of those RF power transistors actually fail. That just amazes me to this day.
Fun times! :)
It sounds like you've been involved with a lot of this sort of thing yourself. :)
Those large heliax cables are expensive, so when someone has to replace a long stretch of it, it makes them very unhappy! ;)
Cell phone coverage isn't very common out in the boonies. So there are a lot of areas that still have no coverage around here. And before cell phones were around, we put in some radio systems to allow oil drilling companies to communicate from well drilling sites to their main offices located in various towns.
Since these guys, for some reason, didn't want to use a normal radio system, but wanted this to seem like a telephone to them, we designed and built a number of these odd gadgets that behaved like a telephone from their point of view, but operated using modified mobile radios at each end. We separated the transmit from the receive and installed big cavity duplexers to allow them to transmit and receive at the same time so that the system seemed like a regular telephone (full duplex) so you could hear the other guy while you were talking.
Of course, ordinary radio is half-duplex. You can't hear the other guy while you're transmitting, and vice versa. For whatever reason, this was "beneath" these hot-shots!
So anyhow, these gadgets got installed at their drilling locations, and we put antennas up on their drilling rigs, aimed at the town they were trying to "hit".
Since this was reasonably high frequency stuff (450 Mhz band), and the antennas were far up on the tops of the drill rigs, we used heliax to connect the radio gadgets to the antennas.
Every single time these folks moved a rig, they failed to call us, and failed to take the heliax down properly. They'd just fold it up in big kinked wads. Then they'd call us to set things up at their new location, and we got to sell them a new run of heliax every single time! Then they'd sqwak about the price of the stuff. So we'd explain how delicate it is, and how you need to be very careful and not kink it or bend it at too small of a radius, etc. Then they'd wreck it again the next time they moved the rig! It was hilarious to us, but they never ever figured it out.
The gadgets worked well. A "cell phone" before such a thing existed. Of course, they put out 100 Watts continuously the whole time they were on the "phone" jawboning to the office. We had to buy special high melting point solder to solder the power transistors to the circuit boards in the radios because they got so hot that they melted the solder on their tabs and disconnected themselves! But I never saw a single one of those RF power transistors actually fail. That just amazes me to this day.
Fun times! :)
I got a different Inkbird unit that has only two probes a while back.
This one. Currently unavailable at Amazon, I see:
But when I tested its probes at a number of points with my dry block temperature calibrator, it was right on at every point I tested. So that's pretty darned good!
I'm guessing the one you got will be just as good. Enjoy! :)
This one. Currently unavailable at Amazon, I see:
But when I tested its probes at a number of points with my dry block temperature calibrator, it was right on at every point I tested. So that's pretty darned good!
I'm guessing the one you got will be just as good. Enjoy! :)
Yeah, the size coax he used the most was 1 5/8", and the usual length was between 140' and 260', but he never had to pay for it. It was always furnished by the Cell Company, along with the BTS & everything else, right down to the cases of Electrical tape. In fact he had so much leftover cable that they didn't want back, that he just turned it in for recycling for BIG $$$$, even full reels of it. But like I said it's just about all Fiber Optics now, and I haven't helped him since that particular change.
Bear
Nice!
If you fail to get a reading on the screen or you get weird blinking or weird readings just BE SURE to push the jacks all the way in. I made that mistake at first and thought I had a faulty unit but then used some super gorilla style strength and pushed them all the way to the black plastic of the jack and bam, it worked like a charm! :)
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