Why Do FM Transmitters Suck?

Filed in archive Commentary on April 14, 2008

Chances are, if you've got an MP3 player of some sort, you've considered what it would take for the music from the MP3 player to be played through your speakers. To solve that problem for myself, I recently picked up a Philips Digital FM Transmitter (Model SJM2306/27) thru a recent Woot-off. It sucked.

Granted, the product actually does what it says: takes your MP3 player and pumps it over nearly any available FM channel. This device in particular has three memory locations for you to store the stations. The trick is: finding a truly dead FM channel to use.

The Seattle area's radio waves are fairly packed. Finding a dead space in the spectrum to try and use this device is, to say the least, challenging. To make matters worse, if you drive a long distance, spaces that were free are suddenly not free anymore, meaning you need to find another one.

I did manage to find a dead spot in my neck of the woods and was able to use the FM transmitter ok. Here's the problem: even with that dead spot, there was a bit of interference. Sitting next to a bus at a traffic light added to the interference.

And this, my friends, is why FM transmitters suck. They are not immune to interference and, often, you can't find dead space in the air waves to use it.