Crest Platinum Wireless TV Link

Crest's Wireless TV Link kit allows you to rebroadcast any video signal to any point around your house, and while that theoretically means you could use it for DVD or even console games, Crest promotes it primarily via the ability it gives you to control Pay TV transmissions and have them running in different points in the house without needing to pay additional fees for seperate Pay TV boxes or connections. That may or may not break the contract conditions of your Pay TV provider -- and given that it has a range of 100m, you may also start inadvertently broadcasting to the neighbours -- but it's overall a neat little piece of AV equipment, and easy enough for just about anyone to set up and get running.

Design
The Wireless TV Link kit comprises two main silver plastic boxes -- one receiver and one transmitter -- along with the necessary power adapters and cabling to connect it to any RCA video source. The boxes are essentially identical -- but thankfully labelled -- and relatively unobtrusive, although if your home theatre decor tends towards black rather than silver, they could stand out a touch. An additional IR cable offers the ability to hide the unit away if it truly does clash too much with your decor -- although more on that below.

The receiver and transmitter boxes both feature short stubby antennae that can be placed in any angle along a 180 degree arc; in our testing we found this had little impact on our picture quality, but as each home setup will vary, it's good to be able to simply change the angle. A button on the left hand side swiches the unit on or off, while a left hand button toggles between three available channels. Crest doesn't sell individual standalone recievers for this kit, so it's really a one to one connection method, unless you want to plump for another transmitter that you may not use.

Features
Setting up the Wireless TV Link involves plugging in the transmitter and receiver units into whatever source and destination you wish to transmit. The connections for this are both via RCA cables, which raises a few interesting issues for anyone pondering the kit. Firstly, there aren't many video sources that offer multiple RCA outputs, and the TV Link's transmiter doesn't act as a pass-through, so if you're using (as we did) an analog Foxtel Pay TV box, you've either got to sacrifice its output in its original location in order to broadcast it further, or use a potentially lower quality video source, such as coaxial, to keep both signals running. Additionally, if you were planning to retransmit to an older TV that only had coaxial inputs, you'd need to put a VCR or similar device in place to accept the Wireless TV Link Reciever's RCA inputs.

If you just want to transmit signals to another room in the house -- the unit claims a range of up to 100m, although we suspect if your house runs for more than 100m you can probably afford multiple Pay TV boxes -- then that's all you need to do to get the TV Link working. It also offers the capability to remotely control your video source via an IR link, and the unit we tested came with a promotional bonus -- a 4-device Universal Remote control that's essentially the little brother of the Crest TCP6 Platinum Universal Remote Control. Setting up the IR link can be done in one of two ways. If your setup allows you to point the transmitter box at your video source's IR port, then you're set. If not, Crest supplies a cable with an IR point at the end that can be snaked around to point at the correct spot. In our testing, however, we had no luck whatsoever with getting the IR cable to actually work. With the box pointed at the IR, however, we were able to effortlessly change Pay TV channels while lounging in bed or working in the study of a suburban home.

Performance
In our testing, the signals we got from the TV Link were as good as you could expect from equipment connecting via RCA cables -- certainly good enough for most medium to low end TV equipment that people tend to deck out bedrooms and children's rooms with. We did hit some interference with the unit -- running around the 2.4GHz frequency you can expect microwaves and home wireless networking kit to possibly impact picture reception -- but nothing that you wouldn't expect with say, a normal TV antenna in poor weather.

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