By Daniel Greenberg
Special to The Washington Post

Remember the peace dividend we were all supposed to get at the end of the Cold War? Did you ever get yours? You just might now.

It's coming from the massive range of the electromagnetic spectrum the military gave up after the fall of the Soviet Union, which, having already enabled the current mobile phone and paging boom, now offers to turn your low-tech home into Jetsons-land. You can remote-control your existing appliances from the other end of the house; better yet, you can extend your existing appliances into new rooms entirely.

Unlike traditional remote controls, which use short-range infrared signals that require a line of sight to their destination, the new devices use radio signals that pass through furniture, walls and ceilings to give you effective remote control from anywhere inside and just outside your home. This may not appeal much to, say, people who live in efficiency apartments, but for many other folks, this provides the chance – in return for picking up a few low-cost add-ons – to avoid buying a lot of expensive new gear.

One caveat: This is an unpolished field, with few products available in each category – one company, Torrance, Calif.-based RF-Link (http://www.rflinktech.com or 310/787-2328) seems out to corner the home-wireless market – and many of these gadgets are only found in the likes of Radio Shack or the Crutchfield catalogue. That means that anyone who buys now will do so without the benefit of much price or feature competition; waiting a while should almost guarantee paying less. That said, consider the possibilities:

Want to add an extension phone in a room with no phone jacks? Rather than pay the phone company's exorbitant rewiring rates, or try to string ugly exposed wires yourself, you can simply plug in a pair of wireless jacks that will beam the phone signal from an existing phone outlet to another room or even outside to a patio (as long as you have an electric socket to plug the jacks into). RCA's Wireless Phone Jacks run $60; another company, Phonex, sells a $99 Wireless Modem Jack that allows you to set up an Internet-enabled computer in a phone-less basement or a laptop on that wired patio. (Don't try to use the RCA units with your modem; they don't work any faster than 14.4 kbps.)

Have you ever been blasting music from the den while doing some rock-and-roll cleaning in the kitchen a few rooms away? Of course, the phone is going to ring during your loudest chorus of "Proud Mary." But instead of doing the indoor, broken-field run down the hall and over the couch to turn the stereo down, it would be easier to pick up your stereo remote control and hit mute.

A remote-extending device will do exactly that with your existing gear. RCA's IR Remote Extender ($40) converts any infrared remote-control signal to ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio and beams it up to 140 feet. RF-Link's Total Control Remote ($40) goes a step further and comes with a programmable remote control.

What if you have living room and bedroom TVs, but only a single VCR? (Or a single DVD player, cable box, satellite receiver, WebTV or whatever.) You can save the cost of buying a new VCR for that second room by attaching yet another wireless gadget. RF-Link's Wavecom Jr. wireless TV jacks ($179) sends the VCR's video and audio signals over the air to a device that plugs into the TV. The Wavecom Sr. ($229) also beams the remote-control signals from the bedroom to the living room, so you can play, pause, rewind, and fast forward just as if the VCR were in the room with you.

This category of device comes in handiest for anybody who's bought a new computer with a DVD-ROM drive. By itself, that drive is nearly useless, since so little DVD-ROM software exists, and watching DVD movies on a computer monitor is like hanging a postcard of the Mona Lisa on the wall. But one of these RF-Link devices can beam the picture and sound from the computer right into a big screen TV. The resulting video and audio are pure and crisp, with no sign that they've been re-routed through the air.

You can also reverse things, using your bedroom PC on your living room TV. RF-Link's Wireless PC@TV ($299) bounces the computer picture and audio to the TV as you "drive" with its included wireless keyboard and mouse. It even fixes the problem of squinting at tiny little computer fonts and icons, using a "TV Magnifier" image enhancement tool to enlarge those to a clear, readable size.

Still more wireless gadgets are here or on the way; Inno Media's InfoWave ($249) uses UHF radio to tie together computers and peripherals across a house, allowing, for instance, a two-computer family to share one printer or one scanner. (It could also acquaint home users with the dreaded phrase "the network is down.") We'll be testing this system – as well as competing, off-the-air options such as Intelogis' PassPort Plug-In Network ($250), which runs over electrical wiring, and Tut Systems' upcoming HomeRun setup, which employs phone jacks and wires – over the next months.

In the meantime, we plan to enjoy the experience of picking up our long-range remote and using its multi-step programming to turn on the VCR, change it to the Sci-Fi channel, rewind the tape and record the Star Trek series that predicted all this.