Why doesn the XTB-II/R digital port work as well as a real TW523?
There are really several possibilities. Noisy environments may cause its AGC to raise the detection threshold above weaker signals, or might result in rejected commands due to its comprehensive error detection. However, because a number of Stargate owners reported this problem, I thought the cause was likely something more insidious than powerline noise. Jeff Stein of JDS kindly lent me a Stargate motherboard to investigate this further. It turned out that even though the XTB-II/R met the X10 interface requirement, it didn’t quite match the output timing of an actual X10 TW523. The Stargate apparently relies on that timing. This was resolved by a firmware update to better match the actual TW523 output timing. If you experience a problem using either the XTB-II or XTB-IIR with a Stargate, please contact me for a firmware update.
