HTC SteamVR Base Station 2.0

does what it needs

Gave as a gift

Let me start this by saying I don’t know if this is the products fault, Amazon’s fault, or both. I bought two to begin with earlier this year as an upgrade from the 1.0 models. Let’s call them #1 and #2. They have worked perfectly fine since buying them. Now after a few months I have expanded my play space and decided to buy two more stations. They arrived and #3 worked perfectly but #4 had a blinking red light from the beginning. Hardware malfunction with no fix. Had to get a replacement. Once that arrives, I plug it in the have the same issue. A third base station and I finally have a working one. Then after about a week of playing with all four, #3 which seemed to be working fine, starts to show a blinking red light with no one touching or moving it. I have a replacement for #3 on the way as of writing this. Hopefully this one works when it gets here and stays working.

I ordered two base stations and it came quickly and was packaged well. When I got everything out and plugged up is when red flags showed up. One of them had the number ‘7’ and the word “loud” all over the sides in sharpie. The other sounded like a jet engine when plugged in. Both flashed blue for a moment then red, meaning critical hardware failure. On the plus side, returning them was easy.

Not sure if these are refurbished units because the original basestations that came with my Valve Index dont have this problem. Both of the basestations I purchased here off of amazon required a firmware update and both were bricked, refused to start again, after powering down after the update.

Valve confirmed that this base station is dead. We have an Index and it gave us a warning that it wasn’t functioning. They used the serial number and found it broken. THIS IS RIDICULOUS: WITHIN 74 DAYS! It’s been on a pole anchored to the wall the entire time. No damage on our part, just randomly died. Our other two base stations have lasted since October of last year.

This Base Station works quite well for SteamVR

Dose whats its supposed to do

These things are overpriced, anyway - they charge what they can get away with. If you can get them from Valve, do so - youll save fifty bucks, which is still a rip off, but less so. And while these are functionally the same as Valves, they dont come with mounting gear, and the power cord is insultingly short. But if youre desperate for some base stations, these are better than nothing. The problem is HTC seems to be counting on that.

Please youtube videos before you buy this or you will regret it.