Whole House FM Transmitter 3.0

After problems with a buzzing sound from another FM transmitter, we were thinking all hope was lost for broadcasting the music for our Christmas Light display. In a last ditch effort, I decided to order this unit. Nice clean music broadcast over the radio waves! This unit worked really great and ran all through the Christmas season. It's really a quality unit and is not very large. Plus, it will run off USB power. Very happy with purchase!

This was an easy and cheap way to send music all through my house. Now I can walk through the house with the same music (usually a baseball game) on all the various stereos, alarm clocks, etc. in the house with no lag between them. Compared to setting up $100 per unit AirPlay or other receivers, this has been great. I even got out my old walkman for listening in the back yard and it's fine. The quality is not "hiss free CD quality" but it sure beats running wires to each room, or a herd of $40 apps to send sound from your computer to your phones and old iPods. We already know how to do that - it's called radio. I do wish it were legal to use the longer antenna. Oh well. It took about 15 minutes to adjust the sound output from my computer to the right level. The sound is quite passable. Some radio receivers are really awful. My alarm clock (iHome) is actually excellent, but my cheap-o iPod/FM receiver is terrible, and it has ultra-fine-tuning FM ability, which might be the problem. My ancient Sony AM/FM alarm clock with analog tuning is great. My Sony digital walkman is decent. It seems that a wider receive range from an analog tuner picks up better, but the digitals are passable even then. You do still get noise from other devices, typical of FM. In my bathroom I have to put the radio up a little higher to get around a noise spot. This isn't the fault of the transmitter, and is quite easy to deal with. Pricing a higher fidelity (near CD quality, wired-in, whatever) solution tends to run very expensive very quickly - either needing to buy multiple small units and speakers for various rooms, or a new stereo with wires run to multiple separate rooms, with speakers. Sending audio directly from a computer to an iOS/Android device runs around 4-40 dollars per device, and still, no power, no speakers. They may offer more control, higher quality sound, and so on, but I was not after a whole-house single audio system. I just wanted to be able to hear the same game in the garage as in the kitchen and office. With one purchase I was able to do that, and no apps, no wiring, no drywall repairs, and far less maintenance.

My last review was a bit harsh because the antenna could not be attached to the device. As I later learned the antenna had left handed threads and not the traditional right handed. It would be helpful if a tag was attached to the antenna to make this clear because with bad vision it is hard to find that out from the documentation. I am going to reorder and give it another shot and will edit this review accordingly. I did set this up to operate with one of my extra iPods and for the most part the transmitter works very well. But as others have said the AGC appears to be non effective. It is easy to have occasional songs that are louder than others to over modulate the device. So in iTunes I normalized all my music and on those occasional songs that are still loud, I set the audio level for the loudest music and the rest, well they may be a bit light but it doesn't clip. This is very important because you wil hear raspy sound if the unit is over modulated. This is not due to weak signal. Another thought is to Google FM radio stations in your area and try to select a frequency where these are no strong local transmitters. Example is I am operating on 107.3 with the nearest transmitter about 20 miles away and over 300 khz away. Operating on 107.3 my nearest transmitter is about 20 miles away on 107.1. This is important because FM radios can be "captured" by a strong adjacent transmitter so selection of a frequency is important. Since this is Part 15 compliant remember not to use wire antenna supplied. The FCC is relentless when it comes to pirate stations and if you use this with the supplied antenna you will be compliant. My purpose is to broadcast my ipod throughout the apartment which it does nicely. Hum on transmit? Nope! Remember to think about power source, In my case it is powered from a powered USB hub. But do keep the audio lead away from the antenna because even though this is very low power it is RF and that can cause some peculiar audio porblems.

Having never used an FM transmitter before, I had no idea what it would be like to set up. No trouble at all, as it turned out. Unpack, plug into electrical outlet, plug a sound source into the "line in" jack, turn on, choose a frequency and you are all set. Only difficulty might be finding a frequency that is not used in your area, but the signal from the Whole House transmitter is so strong it seems to overpower any radio station that might be on that frequency. Over all, very easy to set up and use.

Works great! Able to get all radios in my home with it, even in the basement. Have it connected to my Sirius boom box in the microphone outlet, the only spot available on that unit. Used the mon instead of the stereo and it works great. To increase the volume, I just increase the volume on my boom box and then increase the volume on each radio. That way you can get great volume for listening.

Signal range was about 50-60’ in a wide open clear area. Anything beyond that signal dropped very quickly. Great product If you only need 50’ range.

Besides taking 2 weeks longer to be delivered than advertised the transmitter puts out a relatively weak signal so the sound is not great.