HP 50G - Any way to increase the IR TX/RX range?

[striegel]

Quite a number of years ago there was an application for the HP 95LX palmtop PC that let the user control TV sets with infrared remotes (Was it IR95? ... or maybe Remote Commander?). It recorded the IR signals from a TV's own remote and could play them back by pressing the assigned keys. Sets of these recorded sequences could be saved to files and kept for handling different devices.

When the 100LX (and also the later 200LX) was introduced, its effective IR distance was found to be too short to work from across the room. I don't recall whether anybody ever produced a cure, but it seemed it was attributed to the different IR transmitter diode designed into the new machines.

Alan