One of the things you expect when you buy a baby monitor and bring it home
is that you'll be able to both hear and see your little one clearly, if you
happen to have bought a video monitor. But sometimes people can run into
difficulties with the reception of their baby monitors, and so in this post we
thought it would be helpful to highlight a few of the difficulties which some
people have encountered, and offer advice on how to rectify the problem easily.
One of the first things to be aware of is that there are two main types
of baby monitor - analogue and digital. In most cases you'll find baby monitors
these days tend to be digital, but you can still find analogue monitors around,
and these are often very affordable. For people who live in a small property which
offers very little in the way of interference or obstacles such as thick walls,
an analogue baby monitor may well be perfectly fine, but they do tend to suffer
from interface more than with digital monitors.
Digital monitors on the other hand offer the best reception, the clearest
and the most secure broadcast. However, as far as potential interference is
concerned this isn’t necessarily the end of the story. If you have a cordless
phone or a wireless network you may find that these operate on a 2.4GHz
frequency band, and whilst they may not interfere with each other very much, a
sensitive digital baby monitor may possibly be affected. This is likely to
result in your audio channel picking up a static hiss, pops, squeaks, and
'mush'. You may find this especially the case if you are actually using the
cordless phone, if it is ringing, or if your wireless network is being used to
transmit a lot of data, or is reconnecting. You might in some cases also find
that your wireless network is disconnecting more often than it should, and your
cordless phone picks up static. The best solution is to choose a digital baby
monitor which operates at frequencies well away from the 2.4GHz frequency, and
you can typically find monitors which use frequencies as low as 900MHz.
Another thing to try if you already have a digital baby monitor and
you’re experiencing some interference is to switch off everything which uses a
digital wireless frequency, such as your network and cordless phone and then switch
on the baby monitor first. After the baby monitor is on, then switch all of
your other devices back on. In some cases you can find this resolves the interference
problem as some devices will scan for available frequencies and adjust
automatically to avoid interference, and in other cases you can simply find
which device it is that's causing the interference if you switch each one on
separately in turn, and then look at seeing whether it’s possible to adjust the
frequency of that device.
Finally, some parents have asked about how to increase the actual range
of a baby monitor. You'll find that most digital baby monitors today have a
pretty good range, and if boosted by a good wireless network you really
shouldn’t have too much of a problem. One
way in which we recommend to boost your baby monitors range is to use a
smartphone baby monitor which connects using the internet. In this way you can
connect to the unit in your child's nursery even if you happen to be on the opposite
side of the planet, as long as you have an internet connection.
We think it’s unlikely that you'll ever be
much further than that from your baby!
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