Meat probes are an extremely useful tool for kitchen cooks and backyard pitmasters, allowing you to keep tabs on any meat and poultry you’re cooking. Recently, they’ve even started releasing Bluetooth versions of the tool, making it possible to check the food’s temperature from a distance. Problem is, Bluetooth signal is very limited, often struggling to maintain its connection as soon as you leave the room. The ThermoWorks RFX Meat is designed to offer a more reliable connection.
Instead of using Bluetooth, the new wireless meat probe uses a “patent-pending sub-GHz RFX wireless technology” that, the outfit claims, can provide a more reliable connection compared to Bluetooth. That way, you can leave food in the backyard grill and go back inside the house while still being able to keep tabs on how hot your food is getting, which is normally a massive struggle over Bluetooth connections.
The ThermoWorks RFX Meat works similar to Bluetooth meat probes. You stick it into the whatever meat you’re cooking, then monitor any temperature changes from the companion app. Except, instead using Bluetooth, it’s equipped with a new wireless radio technology that boasts a whopping 2,132 feet of line-of-sight range, which is way further than the 330 feet maximum you can get from the best Bluetooth connections. Even better, it’s able to do some amount of penetration, so you can leave the probe on the meat, close the lid of the grill, and still receive signals, albeit at a much shorter 659-foot range. Still, this has a much better chance of getting a proper signal if you’d rather wait inside, instead of staying in the backyard when you grilling up a feast.
Since your phone doesn’t have the RFX signal this meat probe uses, you’ll have to use a wireless gateway that can receive those signals, which it then sends to Thermoworks’ servers over Wi-Fi. This allows you to monitor the cooking progress practically anywhere, whether you’re watching TV in the living room, mowing the lawn outside the house, or even driving to get some beers after you realized you’ve run out of stock. All you need to do is make sure the gateway is situated in a spot with both line-of-sight access to the meat probe and access to your router’s Wi-Fi coverage. According to the outfit, a single gateway can handle up to 50 meat probes, so you can cook a massive feast and track multiple food items at the same time.
The ThermoWorks RFX Meat also boasts better accuracy than your standard meat probes. That’s because it uses four hidden sensors inside the body, allowing it to measure temperature from multiple points on the meat, which, the outfit claims, enables it to “find the true thermal center of your cook.” Yeah, we don’t know what a thermal center is either, but we’ll take it. A rechargeable battery powers the meat probes, by the way, with each probe able to operate for up to 52 hours on a single 10-minute charge.
The ThermoWorks RFX Meat comes out in September, priced at $159.