2. Setup

Setting up the Ultra Mouse was a breeze last month. How would the receiver do when there are 2 devices? As a refresher, this RF receiver can supposedly learn up to 8 devices though only two devices may be used at any given time. Since we're dealing with the keyboard and mouse, we should not have any problems.

2.1 USB connection

The initial step was to connect the RF receiver to the USB port of my HTPC (in this case the AMS gBOX Pentium 4 system). Once Windows XP detected the device, I placed the RF receiver in LEARN mode by pressing the LEARN button on the RF receiver for 2 seconds. After the receiver is placed into this mode, I took each device and pressed the TEACH button. The RF receiver has a LED named "Status" which will blink rapidly for 4 seconds and then blink slowly again indicating that it has just learned the device's signal.

If you have devices that are transmitting on the same channel, you can change the channel by pressing the CHANNEL button on any device for 2 seconds. The next channel will be used and then the green LED will flash a number of times equal to the channel number.

The RF Receiver	Connected to the USB port

2.2 Some problems

Up to this point, my experience was relatively smooth - just as it had been with the Gyration Ultra Mouse review. However, when I rebooted my system, I noticed that the RF receiver did not come back powered. In fact, I had to pull out the USB cable and then reinsert the cable before Windows detected the device. Before this, there was no indication of any activity on the receiver. After trying the RF receiver with a number of PC's here at home, I came to the conclusion that the problem was probably with the RF receiver. After calling Gyration's support, I received a new RF receiver in a few days and connected it to my gBOX system. Everything worked from that point on. It appears that the original RF receiver that I received had a problem with a USB reset command whenever the PC rebooted (based on information on the Gyration support site at the time). With the new RF receiver in place, I rebooted my system over and over and every time the RF receiver came back up and functioned wonderfully. I was in business.

In case I did not mention this before - you do not need to install any sort of drivers to get the keyboard and mouse to work on your system.

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