revjim.net

I spent a few hours at Fry's Electronics yesterday digging through their selection of iPoddery looking for a method to get my iPod to play over my car stereo speakers. The sales person there claimed that if I chose an FM Transmitter with a higher frequency I'd be able to pick up the signal farther away. According to him, if my iPod was in Dallas and I got one of the high frequency transmitters, I could pick it up as far away as Carrollton. Nice to know. I'm pissed though. I don't want people in Carrollton to be able to hear my music. If they did, then I could be sued for illegal file sharing, right? Ugh. I love Fry's.

Despite its potentially illegal range, I decided that the FM Transmitter was the way to go. I found it kind of funny that, of the 7 to 10 different versions of iPod FM Transmitters they carried and of the 5 to 10 different car mounting options they had, none of them really suited my needs. Maybe I just "have to change my needs so that they are met by what I have":http://crackmonkey.livejournal.com/537536.html. In the end, after searching for over an hour, I picked up a transmitter and mounting combination designed to slide nicely into a cup holder. Of course, my cup holders are too far back and too low to make using it while driving practical, so I'll have to work something else out.

I'm thinking I may just pick up a dash board mount of some kind and then wire an FM Transmitter behind it out of sight. Then I can get an iPod car charger that has an integrated headphone jack so that I'll only have to make one cable connection when putting the iPod in the car. What's really nice about this setup is that I can reuse the mount and transmitter with almost any other device that happens to have a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Ideally, though, I'd like to get an FM Transmitter that attaches directly to the iPod in a seamless fashion. This will make it easier to unplug it from it's charger and pass it around the car if someone else wants to be in charge of the music for a while. It also means that I can use the Transmitter outside of the car which is a bonus. I had an attached Transmitter before I picked up the cup holder version, though, and it didn't sound very good at all. I'm worried that, because it's powered by the iPod, the signal strength is too weak to be usable. Perhaps, the product I had was just bad. It's worth another shot, maybe. I'll pick one up from Fry's today and see how it does.