Quote: Originally Posted by
portreathbeach 
I have read this thread and lots of people are asking what the reception is like while driving. I have installed my USB radio in my van and use the factory fitted ariel. I used an ariel connector (which happened to be connected on the end of a wire) from an old head unit and soldered it directly to the USB radio:
I have written my own front-end, and with the use of Wickerswammie's USBRadio.dll and a VB6 sample code 'SilabTest' I managed to implement the radio in my VB.net project. I find the reception excellent, not quite as good a quality as listening to the CD player or MP3 player, but radios never are.
The RDS is a little bit slow at displaying the station you are tuned too, but the radio text is jumbled. Apart from that the radio works very well, and the signal strength data that can be obtained from the radio is always about 75%. For for the price, it is a must for all car computers. Even with 50Gb of MP3's, it's always nice to listen to the radio now and again.
I'm only speaking from experience in England, it might not be as good in America and other countries, but over here it works fine
Hello I have been working with my silabs usb radio for a little bit and while it does get some reception, it doesn't get as good of reception as what my old radio used to. Before I got power to it, it was hardly getting any radio at all. The thing is, mine doesn't look like those in all of the pictures I have seen in the forums here. When I took mine out of the casing, the antenna was fastened to the PCB on a metal square piece and that was it. I assume maybe it was connected to the ground plane somehow in the middle, but I don't know. When I soldered the coax to it, I put the core of the wire in the big hole left by the antenna and took the foil/shield wires to the outer casing of the usb. Did I do this correctly? I would assume it should sound better than it does currently. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
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