Carl,

I don't have personal experience with the directv remote, but have you 
checked out http://www.remotecentral.com/ ?  They have a lot of info on 
codes and protocols; someone there may be able to help you out.

If I may ask, how do you have your PIC modulate your signals to 
transmit?  I'm beginning to build a remote control as well.  Do you have 
a dedicated port putting out 38 kHz and then another port generating the 
codes, which you gate together with external hardware, or do you have 
one port doing all the work?

Mark

On 12/12/2009 8:46 AM, Carl Denk wrote:
> I have an IR repeater based on a 18F4320 PIC, an Osram SFH 5410-38-Z IR
> or equivalent detector that filters the 38 KHz carrier modulation, and
> an IR LED transmitter. The PIC modulates the output. This all works good
> with most IR (TV, VCR, DVD, etc.) equipment, but the Directv (older RCA
> and new HR-21) equipment doesn't use modulation. If I replace the IR
> detector with a plain photo detector, I can't get a range of more that a
> couple of feet where I need 10 feet. The unit has 6 channels and
> everything needs to be controlled from everywhere which prevents
> programming a signal from 1 channel to output a modulated or not signal.
> I haven't tried amplifying the photo detector output, but seem to think,
> the noise from lights and sunlight will become a factor and not be usable.
>
> Any thoughts would be appreciated.
>    

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