sporcanm

I’d give this thing 5 stars for the price, but the lack of useful instructions & operating tips with the unit made me take away a star, & is probably the reason for some poor reviews here.

First, the unit does not have 4 “bands”. It has 4 frequencies to choose from between 88.1-88.7mhz. If you have a crummy radio that only picks up strong stations, or picks up bits of a strong station on more than 1 place on the dial, most FM transmitters will give you problems with those basic & cheap radios.

I have not used this unit in a car yet (got it primarily for the laptop & mp3 player), but if you follow my tips, it shouldn’t give you a problem.

When you open the battery cover, you’ll find a black wire around the circumference inside. This is the transmitting antenna. If you grab the black tip of it, it extends out & through the hole in the battery cover when you replace the cover.

With the antenna wire not extended & remaining inside, I was able to listen to my music perfectly throughout an entire 2 bedroom apartment on my Eton E5 & Realistic DX-390 radios. On my Grindig Mini 300 & GE SuperRadio* I was only able to get good reception no further than the next adjoining room.

With the wire extended out through the battery cover hole, I was able to get perfect reception on all my radios through the entire apartment, the attic above, & the floor below me… in a metal frame building. With the E5 radio, I was able to pick up the transmitter from the ground floor, 3 floors below.

I tried to twist a couple feet of wire to the transmitter’s antenna wire to extend it. No need to strip off the wire’s insulation… radio waves easily pass right through it. I was able to pick up the transmitter on the ground floor with any radio, & on the E5 form across the street, & down the street a few doors.

It looks like someone handy could just loosen the screws inside & permanently solder a slightly longer antenna wire in it.

The instructions do warn to keep your player volume low or you’ll overdrive & distort the transmitter. I find the transmitter input is sensitive enough to be overdriven with the volume set at under halfway on most players & laptops. So start off with the player volume on a very low setting, & the radio’s volume at average or higher to get a very clean sound.

Since I have a lot of radios with built in speakers, from the size of a cigarette pack to a boom box, I couldn’t see investing in amplified speakers for a player or laptop & still be somewhat portable & mobile. With the transmitter, any decent radio can serve as a wireless amplified speaker system… small enough to fit into a shirt pocket or a large loud box.

Blue & white LEDs require at least 3.6 volts to light, unlike older red, orange, yellow, & green LEDs than only require 2 volts. The transmitter probably uses 3 AAA cells for enough voltage to power the blue LED. The 3 rechargable AAA cells I’m using in it have lasted over a month so far, & are still going strong.

*Everyone seems to praise the GE SuperRadio as very sensitive. It is not, & is only a little more sensitive than any cheap radio you can buy from your drugstore. It is cheap though, & if you do pick up a good signal onit, it has excellent sound for a portable, rivaling many bigger & more expensive boom boxes. With the transmitter, I use it as a super great & loud, wireless powered speaker. It takes 6 “D” batteries, but they last months.