Due to its sensitivity, the long-range remote control IR detector picks up any IR activity that "looks" like an IR signal. While this is usually legitimate remote control signal transmission, other sources of IR light can cause IR signal-like input, especially sunlight, halogen lamps and to a certain extent normal lamps. Applications using IR input from the long-range detector simply have to ignore unrecognised signals.

IR signal recognition is not quite as straightforward as expected. The same signal when sent several times can have slight differences in it, making the signal data look slightly different. If one were to view the signals graphically, they would however look very similar.

Additionally, one would like to reliably recognize signals under more testing circumstances such as varying the range from 1m to 12m, in bright sunlight, bouncing the signal off walls etc. While these signals all maintain their basic form, the actual details can vary quite considerably.

So, the key to signal recognition is to look at the overall form of the signal. The RedRat core code has signal recognition facilities available that can be easily used by application developers. It requires the application to load a database of signals which are then used for recognition of incoming signals.

Each RedRat3 gets a different device name, RedRat3-0, RedRat3-1, RedRat3-2 etc., reflecting the order in which they are enumerated. There is no guarantee that this order will always be the same, so rather than using the device name as the way of identifying RedRat3s, the device's serial number should be used instead.

The core RedRat code provides additional identifying and descriptive information for each RedRat3 attached to the machine, which is stored in the computer's registry and keyed on the RedRat3s serial number. (See the LocationInfo class.)