I finally figured out a funny issue I have been dealing with for a couple weeks now and I was just curious if anyone else had encountered it, and if so what you did to fix it.

I bought an IRBlaster, set it up and things seemed to work. I soon noticed that I could only change to channels with three digits, or occasionally I could change to any channel but other times not. I scoured the forums here and tried all sorts of things (using nice to set priority, deleting video sources and re-adding them, etc..) which solved peripheral issues, but I still had rather sporadic channel changing ability with the IR Blaster.

I decided that it had to be the way I was placing the emitter, so tonight I was fooling around with where I put it on my box to find the place that worked best. While holding the emitter in a position with my hand I could find a location where I could change the channel perfectly, so I would secure it with double sided tape and sit on the couch to change the channel and it wouldn't work. I went insane doing this hundreds of times.

I finally realized that my hand being behind the emitter acted as a way to reflect the IR signal or something, because I can put a solid object in front of my cable box with the emitter stuck on to the box and change the channel perfectly from the couch.

Am I nuts or could this be possible? The emitter is definitely oriented correctly (ie pointing towards the box's receiver).

Sorry for the long post, hopefully it isn't too confusing. This was driving me insane though, and I was curious if anyone else had encountered it, or maybe this will help someone else who is experiencing something similar.

The IR signal from your remote is probably interfering with the signal from the blaster. The device you are trying to control just sees garbled signals. If you place some sort of a barrier so that the cable box does not see the signal from your remote, it will work much more reliably. This could be quite inconvenient if you als need to use the cable box remote to directly control your cable box however.

My irblaster had problems as well. I ending up using a small metal arm to mount the irblaster
on. The arm sits on top of my receiver and it extends out about 5 inchs. The Iblaster is mounted
on the arm to point down at an angle into the ir window of my receiver. It solved the issues
I having where in about 1 out every ten channel changes, the receiver would only get 1 of 2
digits being sent.