Tue 20 Feb 2007
I recently purchased a FM transmitter (Belkin TuneCast II) to connect my iPod to my Mercury Mountaineer. This purchase came after more than a year of stalling due to all of the poor reviews I had read on the net. I was concerned about 2 primary issues: sound quality and reception. I finally bought one with a gift certificate since I wasn’t willing to risk hard earned cash on it.
I drove with this model in my driver-side cupholder for nearly 400 miles. I ran the player for about 8 hours straight through 3 very large metropolitan areas and also through the country. I used the batteries (wish they had included a power adapter in this model). On first setup, I turned on the device by holding both tune buttons down. I located a station range in the lower FM 90’s where I could not find a clear radio station for 0.4 or so on the FM dial. I then tuned my TuneCast right in the middle of those. I turned up the sound on my car and pressed play on my iPod. I was instantly greeted with poor signal and tons of static as reported by many on the internet. I was pretty mad, then I realized my iPod volume was turned down a bit. I turned this up to about 95% and instantly the sound came pumping through my car’s system clear as a bell.
On my trip I had to change the station 3 times as I moved in and out of metropolitan areas. This became evident as the signal would slowly gain static. All I did was first locate the closest station with no or little radio broadcast signal (tons of static), then I dialed the TuneCast to that station. It worked perfectly each time and only took seconds, so this did not bother me at all. When I came back the same way a few days later, I didn’t have to change the station once.
With regard to battery life, I found that my TuneCast ran on the 2 AAA batteries for about 8 hours. When the batteries died, they died instantly and my signal was lost within seconds. I simply replaced, and was jamming again in a minute.
Possible problems people could have with this are (1) poor placement relative to your car’s antenna (good in Mercury Mountaineers), (2) small signal strength of audio player - iPod (20GB, 4th gen) at 95% is pretty loud in earphones and it’s possible not all players can go loud enough to eliminate much of the static in the FM broadcast, (3) trying to tune to a station that already has a radio broadcast in the area or has an FM band close to the one you’re using - find one to use with some room on each side for little static, (4) songs that use intense ends of the frequency spectrum like extremely low basses or high-pitched whooshes from cymbals, etc - I found that songs with a lot of bass and crashes had some static in those spectrums (a limitation of FM in general, but not really an annoyance to me; your radio station overcomes this with special compression).
Overall, I gave this device 4 out of 5 because of the power situation. I would have liked it to come with an adapter. Things I really like are the small size, 0.1 FM resolution on the entire range, batteries optional, auto-on/off feature (works great!). This device may not work for everyone, but you need to understand the limitations of this technology before you go calling it a piece of junk. Small devices like this have Federally mandated operating powers so that they don’t override your local FM stations for everyone else, otherwise I’m sure they would have a strong enough signal for anyone’s car configuration (and heck, entire neighborhood for that matter). (adapted from my review at amazon.com)
