HTC Vive Base Station

We got a used headset and needed the base stations and new controllers. Ordered these base stations and they work great except for one of them. The bottom inlet that you are supposed to be able to use to mount the base station to stands or wall hangs does not have threading. The back one has threading but we are unable to angle the base station if it is attached from the back. As it is now, with not being able to angle, we have deadspots when trying to map our room area.

These lasted only a couple of months before I started having issues with them. Sadly, it was too late to return them. :(

After spending way more money than these things are truly worth, they randomly break entirely. HTC is aware that this is an issue but doesn’t do anything about it. Their solution is to buy new ones. I’ve been through about 3 of these in 6 months. They don’t even get touched so there is no misuse involved. Please don’t waste your money on HTC products. They don’t care.

For the amount of money the whole system costs, its crazy flaky and buggy. Ive had the thing for about a week and out of the 10 times I went to use it 3 times did it start up with not having to find the headset or to find out the battery died for the controllers or the head set couldnt find them. At least the controllers have a charge port.. but Why do the batteries die when not in use? Ive had to charge the controllers more often than I actually used the thing because the few times I went to use it, the batteries where dead. Then after they were charged. I had to waste another 20 minutes trying to pair them. For a system over $1,000 it needs to be on right away, all the time consistently. It needs to be working even when its off to be ready at a moments notice. If this thing was one of my employees, I would have fired them.

Quality products working great

plugged it in and works

You only need TWO base stations. If you buy THREE, you would have to learn how to connect the 3rd base station to VM aka Virtual Machine, which I learned/heard from others, is painstaking and a waste of time. Make you set the base stations high up on the corners, or you will deal with tons of tracking issues. So please understand that if you want 3 base stations, then just buy the 2.0 HTC VIVE base stations instead. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Works.

So I honestly dont know how to rate these. The things arent cheap, you obviously need them for tracking, and when they work they just work, but when they die its a hassle. The only thing can be said about their regular normal use is they can be slightly annoying. They have two spinning motors in them which hum and buzz, and can seem to be loud and annoying at certain times and almost inaudible at others. If you have them attached to lighthouse poles in your room or have them hard-mounted on a wall or something similar they can make some noise and vibrate. However, these lighthouses seem to have an unknown probability value. I personally had one die after less than 2 years of light use (less than 72 hours run time/in-game time), I had one replacement arrive DOA with the same issue as I was needing to replace the dead one (bad laser diode), and youll find countless threads online of these things kicking the bucket at seemingly random times and without warning, along with horror stories from HTCs customer service. Youll also find people saying theyve used theirs pretty heavily for years and theyre still going strong, or someone whos had one for commercial use thats had the thing running nonstop for years and it still works. So its sort of playing Russian Roulette with these things. Is yours going to die one week after the warranty expires on it? Is it going to die after 3 months and youre forced to deal with the legendarily horrible HTC support? Will it last 10 years and you never have a problem? Flip a coin and find out. Another problem that may or may not appear over time with failure rates on these is that the original Vive which has now been discontinued cannot use the version 2.0 tracking base stations, its only compatible with these 1.0 versions. There are no real 3rd party options for these things, so if the production of these is stopped and failure rates remain unknown but a definite eventuality due to moving parts, you may be forced into upgrading sooner than you planned to, or replacement parts may continue to rise in price if production is stopped due to the discontinuation of the original Vive.

So as of right now I only have this one no other base stations and tbh the track on this is great with just one I will be ordering one more soon because it does lose some tracking but I expected that with just one but it works great for only having one