Silabs Radio Integration into Roadrunner

**Cheekz185** · 04-11-2007, 11:17 AM

Does anybody have pictures of how they soldered their antennas to the silabs tuner?

**Beezer** · 04-11-2007, 12:00 PM

Originally Posted by Cheekz185

Does anybody have pictures of how they soldered their antennas to the silabs tuner?

There's some pics in the related silabs threads, but its so simple you don't really need a pic.

1) Get an antenna socket with attached co-ax wire. I bought an antenna converter lead from a car accessories shop for about £2 & cut off the bit i needed.

2) Bare the ends of the co-ax. Twist the outer sheaf together.

3) Carefully desolder the existing antenna

4) Solder the inner core of the co-ax through the hole left by step 3. Make sure you get the wire through the hole rather than just soldering on the surface for strength

5) solder the outer sheaf through the larger hole. It's obvious which one I mean

6) Adjust the casing to fit. Personally, I enlarged the hole a bit with the soldering iron & squeezed the case together whilst the plastic was still soft and pliable.

**goosey2099** · 04-11-2007, 01:47 PM

Ok i've received mine a couple of days ago and this is pretty cool. I've soldered the antena and it works better in the car yet still pretty ****ty. I've noticed the following:
1) if you are in the radio skin and listening to radio, if you click xm winamp crashes
2) If you return from hibernation you get an error message about direct sound
3) Its pretty dam slow and resource hungry
4) I am constantly fazing in and out of sterio(maybe i need to solder a better antena wire to the motorola connector)

Other then that this is the easiest thing to install I've ever seen. An actual plug-n-play!

**CdRsKuLL** · 04-11-2007, 01:59 PM

Hi m8, what dll are you running, right click on it and let me know the size, the latest one is 196k I think and is much more stable and from what Beezer says afew posts up improves the quality as well.. just read up afew posts

CdR

**MrJayDeeOne** · 04-11-2007, 04:19 PM

I posted this in another post
but I think it belongs here

Originally Posted by MrJayDeeOne

my experience with the silabs fm receiver thus far.
Goosey2099 installed the receiver in my car yesterday.
right off the bat the sound quality wasnt that great. The signal improvement with movement of my car.
After shuting my car off and letting my pc hibernate, when I started the car back up and the pc came out of hibernation I had an error on the screen stating something about direct sound piece missing.
I rebooted computer and I got the same error message. I got rid of the error message and I tried to listen to fm receiver and got no sound. I tried to listen to mp3s and got no sound either. I was unable to change the song that was playing, by pressing any of the forward or reverse buttons. When I clicked on and highlighted another song, it just went back to the current song after a few seconds. It said the song was playing but the counter time wasn't changing. I minimized the roadrunner skin and noticed that there was no winamp icon in the tray. I went to my program files folder and clicked on the winamp icon, winamp opened and it caused everything to freeze. I reboot computer, and again I try to open winamp, and again it freezes. I attempt again to reboot and when it comes back up I am able to listen to music again. Mp3 music. I then shut off car and let pc hibernate. I come back to car a little while later and I start car and the pc comes out of hibernation. And I am able to play mp3 music, but I have no control over my pc, I am not able to use the touchscreen. I can't control anything. I reboot computer and it comes back up and is working fine again. I have been at work so I am unable to check on car. And will not be able to for another couple of hours.

Any suggestions

CdR you had asked me last night how it runs with out the fm receiver installed and how it ran before it was installed.

It came out of hibernation with no problems before the fm receiver was installed. from starting up car to music playing was no more than 10-15 seconds.
I removed the fm receiver from the usb, and there appeared to be no error when pc came back from hibernation. But it is taking much longer than it used to. It's taking over 2 minutes now.

**perpetualjon** · 04-11-2007, 04:32 PM

Originally Posted by Chuck

Looks like someone will come out with AM/FM soon.

http://www.silabs.com/tgwWebApp/publ...t/en/index.htm

Awesome find! Once I can get AM on my PC, I'll finally be able to ditch my regular car stereo completely.

**Mr.Fabio** · 04-11-2007, 04:34 PM

Hi Folks,

I have received my silabs radio some days ago, and i am very happy with it. I've done the soldering job too and i have to say that the reception is very good.

Anyway i want to ask you how do you manage the line in of this device...
The silabs Radio uses the Wave Line, and the best would be to use the winamp line in plugin to swicth the input line. I have tried it but without success...

By the Way....
CdR, I want to say THANK YOU for your amazing work

cheers

**thorolf15** · 04-11-2007, 08:00 PM

I'm looking for a place to buy this in Europe, more specifically in France, this is what I found while searching for USB+radio+FM:

Ok I admit it, my humor sucks...

**goosey2099** · 04-12-2007, 10:15 AM

Originally Posted by CdRsKuLL

Hi m8, what dll are you running, right click on it and let me know the size, the latest one is 196k I think and is much more stable and from what Beezer says afew posts up improves the quality as well.. just read up afew posts

CdR

196kb?? Guinos latest RR update release contains the USBRadio.dll thats 184kb.

**CdRsKuLL** · 04-12-2007, 10:37 AM

Yeah, thats the latest one that was compiled last night.. so the most upto date one is the 184kb.. the one thats 196 doesnt support the stereo indicator.

CdR