So many iPods in the world and so many folks who want to connect them to their car’s stereo.
But of all the ways you can do that, perhaps the least understood is the FM modulator, different
from the FM transmitter primarily and that FM modulators work well.
First of all, this is an FM transmitter for our baseline. You plug this in to your iPod. You plug the
other into the cigarette lighter and it transmits the music over the air on an FM frequency over
here to your antenna. No wires, just out of the air competing with local radio stations. That’s part
of the problem. As you drive around, you're going to get different interference as station
strengths differ and you're competing with all those stations all the time so there’s lots of noise
and hiss. These tend to be pretty unsatisfying.
The FM modulator looks like one of these two units here. A little box you install hidden
somewhere in your dashboard that connects to your car stereo. Here’s a basic FM modulator.
This one is an audio box FMM 100A. These are used all the time by car audio installers and it
shows the basic principle. First of all, here you’ve got an antenna input jack. Into that, you insert
the wire or the lead that’s coming from your car’s antenna out on the fender.
On the other end of the modulator is an antenna lead and that goes into your car radio. See
what’s happening here? I'm inserting the modulator in line between the antenna and the car
stereo. You connect power and ground of course to get this thing activated and then you tune
your FM radio to one of the frequencies you’ve selected that this modulator can operate on.
So let’s see, you have 89.1 chosen, tune your radio into that and then, just plug in the cable that
feeds the modulator, in this case into your headphone jack because this device, being pretty
basic, uses a generic auxiliary line feed. Now the music that’s coming out of that headphone jack
is being broadcast on a closed circuit into your antenna jack, no interference.
But here’s a more sophisticated way to do it, specially if you have a genuine iPod. This Alpine is
called the DPR RDS 1 and what it has on one end of it is an actual iPod connector, you connect
that to your iPod or iPhone, make the other hookups like we showed you, power, antenna in and
out, and then select the frequency right here and tune your radio to it, that’s all the same so far
but the difference is, this modulator will not only play the music over the FM frequency you’ve
selected on it, but it will also charge your iPod while it’s connected and the car is turned on, and
it will send some track information to the display of your radio via RDS. RDS is that technology
that a lot of radio stations use to put up their name or the name of what song they're playing but
that gives you kind of a poor man solution to a dedicated, customized, iPod friendly car stereo,
pretty neat.
Now, the pricing, this audio box, a basic unit like this is about $40.00 or $50.00. If you want the
more advanced features that are iPod specific like in this Alpine, this class of products is closer
to a hundred. But either way, FM modulators are a very slick way of integrating your MP#
player or your iPod specifically into any car with an FM radio with good sound, not the kind
of—results you get with these FM transmitters.
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