Alternative to DAB

[Stuart Truman]

Well, if you have an Intravee and an iPhone.

I'd been thinking about DAB as a retrofit but really dislike the windscreen antennae, more boxes and wires etc so I had a potch about with the iPhone on the basis that "there's an app for that"

Downloaded the tunein radio app, which is free, and connected to the car. Press play and hey presto! Even better than DAB, you can pick up any stream from around the world that the app can see.

Obviously if you're going to use it a lot you need an unlimited data plan and reasonable coverage. Once you've got a stream it seems to be fine on both 3G and EDGE with occasional drops into GPRS.

 

[Maxsam]

I was only wondering today if this would work.... I thought it would suffer from a lot of drop out via 3G..

Will try it next time out..

 

[Stuart Truman]

Spotify etc also work, although the bandwidth requirements for music are higher than voice to have acceptable quality.

To clarify a point above, the stream is ok if reception drops into GPRS occasionally (I guess the buffer does its thing) but starting a stream in a GPRS area is slow and littered with dropouts

 

[markeg]

Have used soundcloud in the same way - combine it with a MiFi on a good data plan

 

[Bing]

I was wondering if sound cloud would work - cool to hear it does. Shame my data plan is limited :headbang:

 

[inkey$]

I use tunein radio through straight aux in (now via the magic of an aux in tape!) and it's brilliant. Need to update my phone plan though as on limited tariff.