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MP3 Transmitters Now Legal In the UK
SilentOneNCW writes "From December 8th, it will be once more legal to own and operate an MP3 Transmitter in the UK, primarily used to convey music between an MP3 player such as Apple's iPod to your home or car stereo. The device was originally banned because their transmissions can override and interfere with legal radio stations, which is prohibited by the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. Strong consumer demand for the devices and pressure from Liberal Democrats were among the primary motivators for the amendment."
Christian Slater is unimpressed.
Can I use it with other music players? /rhetorical
My pics.
I believe that in the US, only devices that broadcast over a certain range are regulated and need licenses. Was it different in the UK?
These devices almost always use FM frequencies in the same range as public/college radio, and they almost always use several times more transmitting power than they're authorized to (in the US at least.)
It's a power-level issue. The FCC allows unlicensed transmitters under Part 15; the maximum allowed varies with frequency. You can see the limits on this page. For example, above 960 MHz, unlicensed devices can transmit a field strength of up to 500 microvolts/meter, measured at three meters from the radiating device. (Those units seem a little odd to me, but that's what the table lists.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
In the U.S. these FM transmitters are allowed by Part 15 of the FCC rules. The power output of the transmitter must be very limited to prevent interference. I am not sure what other countries have equivalent laws.
I'm thrilled about this and I don't live in the UK. I use fm transmitters like this to do audio installation art and performances of electronic music.I have a dozen tiny fm receivers and a few transmitters so i can route signals out from laptop/battery powered effects/violin/cheap mp3 players playing loops/home made gadgetry through the speakers that i can spread out through the place i'm performing, it's not particularly loud but i use the electronics to augment not replace the sound of an acoustic instrument usually. It's cheap, highly effective and portable, i can turn any place i like into a performance space, since a lot of places with interesting acoustics often don't have electricity available and aren't suitable for running a bunch of cables around for a large multichannel system this opens up a lot of performance opportunities to me. (also the far away radio transmission sound works for the music I do and the interference between transmitters is fun to exploit as a sound source, especially when i use a couple receivers to feed the output back into the system. people's movements within the space i'm performing change the behavior of the system as well which can be nice as well, makes the whole space responsive) and now I can do this sort of thing in the UK as well. yay!
I can't wait! I can just imagine the converstation on channel 16 when somebody releases a buggy one.
"Mayday Mayday Mayday. This is RMS Titanic, RMS Titanic, RMS Titanic. We are sinking. Over."
"When you walk through the storm, ..."
Hold your head up high,
And don't be afraid of the dark
(Or the (less interesting) equivilent in DSC)
you mean to tell me that the UK legalized something?!?
Actually, the BBC has a story on it. That's where I read about it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/617782 0.stm
I've learned to just sigh and say "the general public is so confused" when I hear mainstream media talk like the iPod is the only portable music player. I sort of expected Slashdot to be a bit more savvy than to use a term like "mp3 transmitter". Who edits this stuff?
At first I thought this was something for transmitting MP3 files around, but it's just a low-power FM audio transmitter to transmit to nearby FM radios. Those things have been around for decades, all the way back to 8-track players and drive-in movie theaters. All the TVs at my gym have one, transmitting on different frequencies.
If you're in a major metropolitan area where all the FM broadcast slots are in use, you may not have much success with one of these things.
"...This isn't a transmitter for MP3 encoded media, this is a transmitter for foobar encoded media - which incidentally has exactly the same encoding, etc."
... that in the UK, laws are generally less restrictive than in the US. Not only that, but unlike the US, where everyone blindly obeys every law no matter how ridiculous it may seem, in the UK we obey laws that are locally convenient, not too intrusive, and not plainly a bad idea. The rest are so commonly flouted that it's basically more trouble than it's worth to do anything about applying them.
That's another law I'm not breaking now. It was a stupid restriction in the first place. Didn't stop anybody from buying one of the things.
BIYC Records
The main point in there being "1949". Yeah, it was over 50 years ago when that was done, time to GET WITH THE TIMES me thinks :)
You're blind. It's been covered on BBC News and Radio 1 more than once and a simple search on the BBC News site will prove it. In addition didn't you wonder why you couldn't buy them here?
Perhaps i'm being a pedant but it is not "once more legal" to own a ipod fm transmitter and the devices were never "banned". As with any FM transmitter they were simply always illegal to operate with out a license. The law made no distiction between high and low power transmitters.
I didn't even know the one i used in my car to link my garmin to the car radio was illiegal?!
:-p
Gosh and to think of all the people must of anoyed within a 2 meter radius of my car by the awsome 50mW transmitter over ridding BBC 2 Radio.
In the not too distant future, next Sunday A.D.
I did have one other use for it though; last summer my neighbour would listen to Kiss FM radio (bland dance music that I hate) very loud while gardening. We tuned the trasmitter to the frequency of this radio station, waited for the current song to end, then started broadcasting over his signal, initialy with songs that could appear on that station but slowly moving towards our musical tastes. Within 30 minutes he was listening to Captain Beafheart none the wiser that he wasn't listening to the radio anymore. We considered making up some fake news-flashes but decided against it because we wanted to continue listening to our music choices rather than his and, to this day, he still doesn't know what we did.
Input error. Replace user and press any key to continue.
And he links up his turntables/iPod to it & broadcasts tunes to all the cars parked at our local skate park, it's like having one big sound-system. Awesome!
http://nathanlindsell.blogspot.com/
the fm transmitter I have operates on a choice of 4 diffrent channels all 88.* FM never had a problem with interference from any other transmitter.
If car stereos just had line-in ports as standard, we wouldn't need these FM Transmitters - but they don't, but why not?
Yup. I've tried tuning in outside the car - travelling in convoy, and instructing the other driver to tune his radio to mine - but unless you're really tailgating the car in front, there's no way you can pick up that signal. You can tell how low the power is because 'proper' stations interfere with it if you accidentally stumble on their frequency. So there's really no incentive to try to create a 'pirate' station - it just won't get picked up.
So it's great news - a new piece of legislation actually 'for the people'. Brilliant!
Incidentally, you should retract your aerial if you want to improve reception - or get an FM modulator (that's wired into your aerial) rather than a transmitter. Or get a head unit with a line-in port (although that's more expensive).
As it says in the BBC article, only some devices will be legal.
Now certain FM transmitters, which can be tuned to spare frequencies, will be legal from 8 December.
However, many devices currently on the market will remain illegal as they do not meet the legally required technical specifications and could interfere with radio broadcasts.
All approved transmitters will carry a CE mark indicating approval for sale in the European Union.
So, as I see it, legal transmitters will not only have to meet strict power limits, but also be tunable only to certain spare frequencies in the FM band. I spent some time searching the Ofcom web site to try and find exact details of the regulations (e.g. which frequencies exactly), but without success. If anyone else can find them then I for one would be interested.
Maybe you should be learning from this. Something like; I need to read more widely and pay more attention to the society and world about me.
In addition didn't you wonder why you couldn't buy them here?
There are plenty of places that will sell you one here. You know, for use while you're travelling out of the country.
My FM transmitter broadcasts on 88.2-88.9. Driving between midlands and London, in the UK this is Radio 2's regional frequency range, so throughout the journey Radio 2 kept kicking in and forcing me to change the FM transmitter's frequency and adjust the car radio.
One way to fix this is to detach the aerial from the roof of your car, it should still receive your FM transmitter's signal but not get interference from FM radio stations.
As a constantly annoyed US listener, these things overpower legit stations all the time in my area (Washington DC MEtro area). There are a few programs on PBS that I like and I honestly can't make it on a trip without hearing howard stern or rap or other peoples music 3 or 4 times. (The PBS station happens to be on 88.1, the default that many of these are tuned too)
It has never been legal to broadcast on radiowave in the UK without a licence (AM, SW and LW included).
The main reason was to prevent emergency and millitary channels being interefered with (remember in the UK in the last 40s, early 50s radio was still wired in to the home, not broadcast). To broadcast on across a frequency range, approval had to be sought (in part so the authorities could check there were no conflicts), then registered. At the time there were no thougts about power as incredibly short range devices were not about.
As a side note, to broadcast on a radio frequency you also have to be licenced and certified (I assume the new act to allow the short range MP3 device transmitters will negate this as well).
I find it bizarre that a person who claims to be "generally interested in radio communications" has never heard of the Wireless Telegraphy Act.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
As you'd have seen if you read TFA. It's only been legal to sell them very recently, when they started CEing them ready for this change in the law.
Until well into this year, you could only get them from foreign ebay sellers.
That's not what I meant. I know of at least two retailers in my local area that have been selling them for a couple of years or more. One guy who sells executive cars supplies such a device professionally fitted with them, for just a couple of hundred quid, and has been doing so for over a year.
To suggest that just because using something would be illegal you can't actually buy it in the country is naive.
Great news about the transmitters you plug into the iPod being legalised - now if we could only update our copyright laws to permit ripping music CDs we own to computers we own and then onto MP3 players we own, for our own use, we'll be home free.
I live on a small island in between France and the UK. Because of this, we get French, English and local radio stations. Even though all the frequencies stay the same, it's still a nightmare finding a free, clean frequency. Cars are also much better insulated these days: an old original mini I had worked far better than a modern VW we have that clearly shields the head unit in the car from interference as the FM transmitter won't work if it's anything more that maybe 1 foot away. The mini, in comparison, didn't have any insulation, so the transmitter could be several feet away.
Finally, going across a country such a France is a further nightmare as you're forced to changed frequency every half hour or so as you go through regions with different radio staion frequenies.
The solution? Buy a head unit with an audio input socket, then you can use a cable, thus saving interference issues and saving a shed-load of power.
I like the
http://www.frenchgeek.com/
It's not an MP3 transmitter, it's a transmitter for uncompressed audio. It's not a zip transmitter, or a wma transmitter, or a real audio transmitter, or a CD teleporter. It's an FM audio transmitter.
Dekker Dreyer
so subscribers don't have to listen to commercials. Yeah, I know satellite radio, but FM is local which makes radio better.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Another good one from the Liberal Democrats.. (I'm not British but i root for the LibDems anyways :-)