IR Remote

I had a couple of the below IR remotes and tested it out. The remote works (most of the time) when a foot away pointed directly at it. Any further away and not directly pointed at the receiver and it only receives random garbage. All it contains is a 1.5V battery, which must not be enough for a decent signal?

But what about a regular remote? We tried a regular TV remote and got very consistent results. Next thing we did was look online to see if any local places had any over sized novelty remotes. And to our luck we found one! The receiver even picked up on it too.