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Five FM iPod Transmitters Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "If you want to listen to your iPod or other audio player in your car, but you don't have a cassette deck or a swanky I.C.E. system, then the answer is to transmit the music over FM to the car's radio. HEXUS.lifestyle reviews five FM transmitters for the iPod and friends, investigating how well these devices cope with broadcasting music over a 2 meter-or-so radius. Some readers will be aware that it's been less than a year since these became legal in the UK, so the majority of iPodding Brits have only recently discovered that they can tune into their MP3 collection on the road."
There is a story going round that truckers in their convoys are broadcasting music to each other and are getting a great deal better than 2 M radius. The guy that told me the story gave me the details, which I forgot.
Anyway, the idea isn't new. There were similar products for playing one's Walkman over the radio. There was also a device that played music (maybe from a Discman) over the radio by inserting it into the cassette player. (Guess we can't do that any more.)
Personally, I've never had a good experience with an FM transmitter. I bought a Griffin iTrip for about forty dollars, and it wouldn't work unless it was on the corner of the dashboard next to the antenna. It chewed through my iPod's batteries, and even when the radio could pick its signal up the sound quality was mediocre at best.
Then my friend gave me another transmitter that worked better than the iTrip, but after a while it broke and the sound only came out of one speaker in my car.
Now I just burn CDs. They aren't as convenient as an iPod, but they sure do make everything easier (not to mention cheaper).
I occasionally find it amusing to tune my car radio to FM 87.9, which (in the U. S.) is the default setting for most of these FM transmitter gadgets. I commute on Route 128 in Massachusetts so there is plenty of company, and more often than not there is an audible signal on 87.9.
Mostly it seems to be people listening to Howard Stern on Sirius Satellite Radio, but you also get a sampling of other satellite stations and (most likely) iPods.
The signal will usually be audible for the better part of a minute. Oddly enough, I've never managed to identify the car doing the transmission. You'd think you could tell from the positions of the cars around you and the strength of the signal, but I can't.
I discovered this because I have an iPod FM transmitter, set for 87.9 myself (after much experimentation I was never able to find any less-used channel).
What seems perverse that the signals from other cars' transmitters are not only strong enough to hear when my transmitter is off, they are strong enough to produce annoying an audible interference when my own transmitter, inside the car, is on. You'd think a transmitter two feet from the radio would totally overpower that must be at least forty feet away with two car body's worth of shielding in between, but no.
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The iPod has a fairly nice interface for plugging in accessories. It's got a nice clip, and the connector supports video, audio, power, data, and (as I recall) a serial interface for simple commands. The connector can be bought cheaply and the pin-outs are available. I'm slightly surprised that other manufacturers don't implement it; I wonder if Apple have copyrighted or patented it, but I wouldn't have thought a connection of this nature would be eligible for this kind of protection.
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I have the Belkin one as well. I got extremely frustrated with it as I couldn't drive more than two miles without something overpowering the signal. Eventually what I did is went to Best Buy and spent $100 on a new stereo for the car. Now, like your friends Prius, I have a line in jack. Very clear, no static, and much higher quality sound. I now just use the Belkin as a charger.
If anyone is considering buying a transmitter, consider doing as I did. Just replace the stereo, Besides the higher quality sound and zero interference, you get the benefit of being able to use it with any device, not just an iPod.
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Are you literally looking for 'blank' spots with the radio and then tuning your transmitter to that frequency? I've had much better luck just stepping both devices through the spectrum; it seems that a lot of the time, overriding a weak station works a lot better than overriding a 'blank' frequency.
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