Thread: digital radio

yeah i'm aware there are quite a few dab car stereos on the market now. Although these may have specific specialised aerials for this purpose.

The coverage is excellent where I live and all around my area too. There about £100 here in the uk (for a usb one)

This is definately something that I'm doing when I get my car on the road. Have already bought a Psion Wavefinder DAB tuner. Has an external aerial jack so you can hook a DAB car aerial to it, because the internal one isn't too bright.

It's USB but takes an external 10V power supply. I have run it with a 12V DC adapter with no problems (which should run nicely off a molex connector).

Cost £69 on ebay for me, which wasn't bad - but if I put this one in the car I'll have to buy another because having DAB radio on the PC while I work is really really good. I haven't played MP3s in months.

I use dabbar (www.dabbar.co.uk) to control the wavefinder instead of the supplied software as it's much better. Also lets you connect winamp to it and stream the text service to winamp's display. This can then be reproduced on a LCD/VFD display so you can drive around and the song names on the radio will pop up. How cool is that?

Only problems I can see is it automatically re-scanning to the closest DAB frequency as the software is designed not to be moving between the different coverage areas, but we shall see.

If you're near Wiltshire at any time feel free to pop by and borrow mine for a test.

It's got a built-in HTTP-style streaming protocol. So you just load up http://localhostort (port of your choice) and it gives you a load of links to .m3u files, which play the streams.

It's all configured in the program itself.

The scrolling detail stuff is only available in the beta, which is at http://www.dabbar.co.uk/betatest.htm

I'm from manchester so i think its ur a bit far away. Umm well surely if it re-scans to the best frequency its not going to perform very well while moving?

I've had a look for a dab car aerial but can't find any.

Will be brilliant if it does work though.

I bought one of these a while back - thinking the same things as you guys were talking about - install in car etc etc - however, I have never got the *@#! working. it is just a 'pretty' piece of blue plastic sitting on my desk gathering dust - so good luck to you, and I would be interested in hearing how you get on - maybe a DAB PCI card is the way to go. There were some pretty informative message boards kicking round related to it - cant remember the URL (so that doesnt help you) - but I am sure if you search...

Would be grat to get this as a controll in Media car application.