My best friend is a professional installer and set up this remote for me. My equipment is in a closet and I have a MRF 250 base station. Setting up the remote was a breeze for him except for the Uverse VIP1216 box. He spent hours messing with the programing but it is still hit or miss whether it will work. Some buttons work better than others. For example the channel, rewind and fast forward buttons control the box pretty good, but I have to push the select button and directional buttons surrouding it 3 or 4 times to get them to work. You can look at a light that blinks on the box when you push buttons on the remote and tell that it only responds when it wants to. The remote works great when using it for anything other than the Uverse box.

Interestingly, he looked up codes for the box in a RTI database and the frequency for the remote was slightly different (36.1 vs. 36.6 I believe). He tried changing the frequency but the program wouldn't let him. He also tried cutting and pasting HEX codes into the buttons that are not responding. He probably tried a dozen other tricks that I don't understand. My unprofessional opinion is that the frequency the remote is sending out is a little bit off.

If anyone has any ideas on fixing this thing I would be grateful if you would pass them along. I am tired of getting an @ss chewing from my wife every time she tries browsing through channels on this "p.o.s remote I spent way too much money on."

Bump. We are going to swap out the 980 for a used 950, but I am still curious if there is something simple we are overlooking that would make this cool looking color remote work.

Thanks

What's going on with Universal? Do they use a different IR engine with their remotes? the 980 is a cool looking remote, but compared to the 950 its much lighter and the buttons feel cheaper. I am very dissatisfied with the direction this company is headed. Codes between their remotes act different depending on the remote you use. The same codes that will work on an 850 or 900 that are imported to a 980 with universal browser do not work. I suspected at first the VIP1216 may have been toggle bit even though Motorola has never done that before but after examining hex and ir from RTI which works with no problem that was not the case.

I have come to the point that I will no longer sell Universal. The reason being is the fact that many customers change from one provider to another. At any time a customer that had Directv may change to ATT where they will then end up with a remote that no longer is reliable. Not to mention the wasted man hours in trying to program a remote that is unreliable. I regret selling and these pieces of junk.

And this is just the tip of the problem. How does a company like universal bring a remote to market like the 980 based on windows CE, that uses Activesync or communication when Vista has been out as long as it has. Sure you can make it work with Vista but it should just work, I shouldn't have to make it work.

Nice try universal, someday when your having to sell products on the shelf at Sams and Costco like Harmony because the CI guys wont use your product any more you may just wake up. I won't be looking back.

A word of warning for anyone planning to use the mx980 with AT&T Uverse. We never could get it to work. However, we swapped it out with a mx950 and everything works great. I understand the mx900 will work also.

I have had an MX-980 paired with an MRF-350 for about 4 months now, and it works good. i used the hex codes that I got from a pronto guy. I think your having problems because the MRF-250 is the last generation of base stations. try using an MRF-350, or if you don't want to spend that much, try the newer MRF-260.