I just purchased at Bond and got it working quickly with my ceiling fans. I was excited to see that there is support for fireplaces. But I was unable to get it working.
As far as I know, this operable RF frequency range is a hardware limitation of the chips the Bond Bridge uses.
If and when some company develops newer, more capable chips for RF, WiFi, etc which are compatible with Bond’s other bits of architecture and which can be sourced / integrated within appropriate cost margins, I believe there is nothing from their software side or development capability which would prevent supporting more devices under those theoretical expanded operating ranges, such as adding the RF frequency your fireplace leverages, or making 5 GHz WiFi bands available.
As of yet, though, the Bond staff have not shared any roadmaps for future hardware revisions such as this. Still, it is helpful to let them know examples where additional functionality would be desirable.
Glad you got your fans working with the current Bond Bridge, though - congratulations and welcome to the forums, Scott!
Indeed the Bond Bridge (BD-1000) hardware does not support 900MHz band. Would only be possible through hypothetical future Bond products.
A challenge with this particular remote, and 900MHz remotes in general, is that they are frequency-hopping spread spectrum. They may also be transceivers. So it’s a much more elaborate RF system than the fixed-signal RF remotes for ceiling fans and most fireplaces.
I had a follow-up question here. The FCC approval for the bond home seems to suggest that the hardware DOES contain these radios from a hardware level and there’s possibly a way to turn this communication on. The FCC approved the use of the hardware on these frequences (902-928). Any thought on whether this is possible?
There’s two FCC IDs. One for the first HW rev (snowbird) and the other for the second HW rev (zermatt, S/N starts with ZZ). – We dropped 900MHz from the second HW rev.
In a nutshell, the 900 MHz devices often require specialized radios and stack (ZWave, LoRa, MFSK, FHSS (the case for this Glo Cosmo remote), etc) that we were not prepared to support with the HW, also removing the 900 MHz let us improve the overall RF performance in the Zermatt revision.
Got it. Does that mean I can use the 900mhz if I have the first hardware revision? Or is there no way to use it, even if I have the snowbird hardware revision? The problem is that I have a 902mhz system I want to interface with (And would be happy to have two bonds if needed to accomplish it)
I hear you. We originally had a 900 MHz capability in our MVP hardware, but never turned it on. There just are not enough products in that range to justify the cost & complexity in a consumer product. Maybe someday there will be a breakthrough in SDR tech and we could put a transceiver that can do a broad range into a future Bridge.
