Radio Free Cambridgeshire, or Devon, or Leicestershire…
I don’t normally go on about geeky toys, and I promise to not make a habit of it. Today we finally joined the ranks of the MP3 Player Owners and got a cheap no-brand 1GB thing which is utterly tiny - it’s not much bigger than an AAA battery. We also got one of those things that plugs into the headphone socket and broadcasts the signal over low-power radio. They’re meant to live in the car, so we can put loads of children’s stuff on the MP3 player and avoid having a clutter of tapes (with the requested tape always left at home), and also get around having no CD player in the car.
I tested it out tonight as I had to pick up some furniture (not Ikea!) and I had one of those wow! moments with technology. There was a thing about the size of a pack of chewing gum that contained a ridiculous amount of music, which it then piped down a wire to a gizmo plugged into the cigarette lighter that turned the pack of chewing gum into a mini radio station, whose signals were then picked up by the aerial on the roof, back down a wire into the car stereo and out through the speakers. (Much of this could have been avoided if the stereo had a socket for a simple wire rather than going via radio waves.)
It was like the first time I put a music CD into a lap top - this shouldn’t have been happening. This tiny bit of electronics was acting like a hi-fi, which is large static black boxes in the corner of the living room. I expect the amazement at the MP3 player and radio thing will wear off soon, just like it did for the lap top. I also expect that the children don’t find it remarkable at all - it’s a normal thing to them, like the computer. I wonder what gizmo they’ll get amazed by when they’re adult, and what gizmo will completely baffle them when they turn into old fogeys.
I also wonder how many car cigarette lighters are actually used to light cigarettes, compared to how many are used as power sockets. I finally wonder how long the range is - if someone travelled in convoy with us in another car, could they pick up Radio Free {insert county here}?
January 17th, 2007 at 1:46 am
An experiment for melrose?
January 17th, 2007 at 11:13 am
I’ve heard that the range isn’t great: 5-10m maybe.
If your car stereo has a tape slot, you can buy a gadget that looks like a tape with a wire hanging out that plugs into the MP3 player’s headphone socket, and cuts out the faffing with radio waves.
January 17th, 2007 at 11:29 am
I’ve heard that the tape adaptor things are hit-and-miss - some work fine and some are pants. Gina told me the one you use is fine, but a colleague said I could have his for free as the sound quality was so poor he gave up. Admittedly driving at motorway speeds isn’t the place where you can appreciate sound quality, but I was put off the tape adaptors.
January 18th, 2007 at 12:16 am
usefully timed review - we are considering just such a bit of technological geekery for very similar reasons.
February 4th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
[...] The music-playing pack of chewing gum and FM transmitter worked well enough, particularly when we realised that turning off the radio’s RDS would stop it trying to be too helpful. There was occasional interference from local stations, but just bumping the frequency up or down by a little usually sorted it. The battery lasted nowhere near as long as we were expecting, so we were glad we’d brought some spares and a charger. We’re solidly working our way through the Roald Dahl canon - Simon Callow reading the Twits and Geoffrey Palmer reading BFG were probably the best so far. [...]