The technology of baby monitors…

Remember I warned you that anything of interest to me was fair game for The Robservatory? Well, here's the first non-Mac-related post, but it's at least vaguely technology related.

My wife and I have a nearly two-year-old daughter, Kylie. Way back when at the baby shower, someone gave us The First Year's 900 MHz Two Receiver Monitor set. For those without children, the purpose of these devices is to dramatically increase the stress level in new parents. After placing the transmitter in the child's room, the receivers pick up the child's every sound. So basically, every noise your child makes at night or while napping becomes something new to worry about -- "Honey, did that breath sound labored? Is she getting a cold? Did you remember the blanket, I think her teeth are chattering! Is she breathing? I can't hear her now -- quick, go check on her!!"

In all seriousness, these are very handy devices for monitoring your child without having to sit outside the door to their room. In our case, Kylie's room is upstairs and on the other side of the house from ours, and I sleep quite soundly, so I really need the speaker to jar me awake in case she needs something overnight. So why am I talking about monitors here? While our unit worked well at first, it had recently started to get very noisy. Every so often (like 10 times a minute, really!), we'd get a loud burst of static, or very loud "white noise" sound that would last 20 seconds or so. Sometimes we could even hear half of the neighbor's phone conversations.

During the day, this is just slightly annoying. At night, though, it's a sleep depriver: set the unit loud enough to hear Kylie's cries, and the static bursts will wake even me from a deep sleep. It has gotten so bad that I have taken to just turning it off at night -- hardly the behavior conducive to monitoring one's child! We have moved the receiver and the transmitter to many different locations, but the interference persists. While I'm not sure of the cause, there are so many waves running around the airspace in our home (Bluetooth, Airport Express, Airport Extreme, cordless phones, cell phones) that it could be almost anything.

Tired (literally) of the lost sleep over static, I set out on a mission to find a better solution. The geek in me, of course, wanted to set up a Mac mini with an iSight, iGlasses to see in the dark, and a PowerBook in our bedroom to monitor the audio and video from Kylie's room. For some reason, my wife was against that plan, go figure!

Instead, I did some net digging, and eventually found that The First Year's makes a 2.4GHz Ultra-Range Monitor (also pictured above right). I really don't care about the range, but I was hoping that the different frequency might mean the end of the interference. After some scouring, we found a set in a local store and took them home late last week. After a few nights' worth of testing, I'm very pleased (and very well rested!) to report that they work perfectly. I have yet to hear even a peep of interference, and the audio is crystal clear. These things are a bit more money than the 900MHz models ($75 vs $50 or so, I think). But if you're a parent using a noisy 900MHz model, this unit is well worth the extra cash. No more unexpected static noise jolts waking me up in the middle of the night ... now it's just Kylie! :)