Personal radio station

[HomeBrew2]

Most of the informational radio shows in my area have gone away and nobody plays the music I like and if I find a decent station the commercials are intolerable. The solution? An MP3 player ? ... works fine for one location but, I'm in and out of the shop and house and constantly wandering and tractoring all over my 5 acres and don't like headphones and carrying an expensive unit to play something all day. My solution was an FM transmitter ... a real FM transmitter. WORKS BETTER THAN EXPECTED !!! Infor about the unit I bought can be found at Ramsey.

Cheers!

 

[jmc]

Interesting. What do you transmit with it?

John

 

[bebster]

Can you plug your MP3 player into it just like it were a set of headphones?

 

[HomeBrew2]

I have a dedicated PC hooked to my A/V receiver with 13GB of music and spoken-word so, I'm mostly broadcasting off that for now. However anything running thru the receiver can be transmitted the way I have it hooked up.

It takes a standard 1/8" mini-stereo jack as input. It comes with an RCA stereo pair-to-mini jack so I plug it into a line-out on my receiver. Running from an MP3 player headphone jack would just require a patch cord with 1/8" male jack on each end I'd say.

 

[hobbyfarm]

Hey, wait a minute,
That was MY idea a long time ago. I just could not find a decent FM transmitter in my price range.
Did you have to build it from a kit??

 

[CarlGlas]

If you have an FM receiver you might consider an XM Radio.
I bought the XM Roady2 (plug & go) earlier last year for under $50 and a year's paid subscription works out to $11.95 a month. They have about 150 channels of various formats to choose from so there's a little something for everyone.

 

[HomeBrew2]

Yeh, I've been looking at them for some time too. I was close to buying the one the C Crane Company has had out for years but even by doing some mods to it folks were only getting 70 - 100' range.
I bought mine from BigEd on eBay. He assembles and tests them and seems to be a class act. The total was $178 delivered. I believe the manual can be downloaded on the Ramsey site to get an idea of the assembly complexity. It sounded easy to me as I have quite a bit of experience with soldering but, with several hundred joints, the possibility of making a few "cold" joints is pretty high. I was afraid that tracking down a cold joint would take me forever. Assembly was $30, so I opted for that solution.

 

[HomeBrew2]

Yes, I have several friends with XM. I've thought about it and may do that some day. For now I'll be downloading podcasts (for free) of stuff I like ... GunTalk, Beer Radio ... ya know the important stuff /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif