MP3 Transmitters Now Legal In the UK 125
SilentOneNCW writes "From December 8th, it will be once more legal to own and operate an MP3 Transmitter in the UK, primarily used to convey music between an MP3 player such as Apple's iPod to your home or car stereo. The device was originally banned because their transmissions can override and interfere with legal radio stations, which is prohibited by the Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949. Strong consumer demand for the devices and pressure from Liberal Democrats were among the primary motivators for the amendment."
Here in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
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Most rechargeable devices seem to be capable of charging from USB power, so I don't see why you'd need an iPod to be able to recharge, as that's a standardised interface.
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/DIGITAL-FM-TRANSMITTER-CH
Low power signal (Score:3, Interesting)
So it's great news - a new piece of legislation actually 'for
Part 15 (Score:5, Informative)
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Part 15 (Score:2, Informative)
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other uses/yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
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skoria at gmail... see you soon!
Just what we need (Score:5, Funny)
I can't wait! I can just imagine the converstation on channel 16 when somebody releases a buggy one.
"Mayday Mayday Mayday. This is RMS Titanic, RMS Titanic, RMS Titanic. We are sinking. Over."
"When you walk through the storm, ..."
Hold your head up high,
And don't be afraid of the dark
(Or the (less interesting) equivilent in DSC)
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"When you walk through the storm, ..."
Hold your head up high,
And don't be afraid of the dark
Well, I suppose the Titanic was registered in Liverpool...
holy cow (Score:1, Funny)
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I think you'll find... (Score:3, Interesting)
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I always think of it as removing a decision I have to make from the otherwise possibly very complicated business of moving a 1 ton block of metal around in a place where soft squishy people might be. Light is red - I stop. End of story.
I feel the same way about safety margins. Sadly, too many people seem to think that safety margin means, e.g. "Ooh, I can get there a bit quicker/be a bit closer to that car, and it's still safe."
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It was just a general point - wasn't having a go at you specifically or the scenario you describe :)
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Yes, but it was the liberal democrats who made it happen. They also want to legalize [libdems.org.uk]:
It's an FM transmitter, not an MP3 transmitter (Score:4, Informative)
At first I thought this was something for transmitting MP3 files around, but it's just a low-power FM audio transmitter to transmit to nearby FM radios. Those things have been around for decades, all the way back to 8-track players and drive-in movie theaters. All the TVs at my gym have one, transmitting on different frequencies.
If you're in a major metropolitan area where all the FM broadcast slots are in use, you may not have much success with one of these things.
Re:It's an FM transmitter, not an MP3 transmitter (Score:5, Interesting)
Therefore as far as I know there's no new permanent FM licenses granted, altough the occaisional short term licence may be granted for special events.
This means that in the UK you're unlikely to be in a place where the FM range is full. Even in London you can find a few gaps. Although I didn't know of any drive in cinemas in the UK. Because of the law mentioned in this article, gyms tended to not transmit on FM either, I've seen two solutions to the problem, some gyms have headphone sockets on the pieces of equipment and others have special receivers that transmit on a different band, they give you a receiver when you enter the gym so you don't need your own. This is why FM radio is not exactly a big selling feature on MP3 players over here (well it's not in the US either considering the popularity of the iPod, but in the UK if someone launches a device with built in FM the first response is 'what no DAB?')
It will be a while before FM disappears entirely, their first priority is getting analogue TV off the air. Why is it the government is forcing this? I don't know, it should be up to the market to decide.
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Actually, that's a really interesting question. We have similar regulations going in place here in the US, although they've pushed back the deadlines time and time again. I can't fathom what stake the government has in this.
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It already happened with UMTS (3G) in Europe, where governments made tens of millions.
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Re:It's an FM transmitter, not an MP3 transmitter (Score:4, Interesting)
DAB radio is in much the same boat. The complaints about getting a signal and low quality would go away if DAB could crank it up, spread out a bit and not worry about overriding FM transmitters.
With the analog channels off, the digital transmitters can boost the power (i.e. better range) and use some of the huge amount of freed bandwidth so they don't have to compress so much (i.e. less blocky artifacts). Even better, they can start broadcasting the free-to-air HD channels over freeview, which they just don't have the free bandwidth to do now. Regions are switching over to digital TV only from 2008 to 2012. I for one can't wait. TV signal with good reception, lots of channels and HD to boot? Given I live in the wilds of Dorset, my analog signal is barely watchable, and I only get about 2/3 the multiplexes. Improving that has got to be good.
Oh, one last thing. The public owns the airwaves, thus the government gets to allocate their use on the public's behalf. Given digital TV is so much better, and they can't really coexist, its a choice between digital or analog. It's not one the market can decide, as you'll just end up with a bunch of legacy equipment that won't go away for 30 years and stops the new equipment working properly, while private companies profit excessively at the cost of the public. Just look at the huge mess having two systems of weights and measurement has caused.
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I'd say DAB coverage seems to be quite good in the areas where it is rolled out. It's just a shame the sound quality is so poor. They should use OG
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All the "+" formats I've heard sound kind of phoney, at least the ones that do this trickery.
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http://www.codingtechnologies.com/products/aacPlus
They claim "Excellent quality stereo down to 24 kbps". That may be optimistic, but I don't see anything that suggests that you are restricted with the bit rate.
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Digital can give better broadcast quality
But doesn't. MPEG artifacts are painful, just look at some high stress images (multiple flash guns at a press conference for example), it's laughable.
Of course, while many people working for UK broadcasters don't see the difference between 4:3 and 16:9, we're bound to be technically screwed. Still, at least DVB-T as implemented in the UK is better than our DAB implementation.
can fit in many more channels in the same bandwidth
Yeay, more quiz shows and reality TV.
The complaints about getting a signal and low quality would go away if DAB could crank it up, spread out a bit and not worry about overriding FM transmitters.
Current DAB radios tune in to Type-III FM, ~200MHz, nowhere near the FM band of 87.5-108. Quality
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No, the main complains are that they're bulky and expensive. I got a tiny pocket analogue radio years ago for a few pounds. Can you do that with a digital radio? No, the cheapest sell for something like £50 and it's huge.
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The government is forcing the UHF TV shutdown because it thinks it can then auction the spectrum. The theory is:
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I knew there was a reason why I didn't care that the Zune has an FM radio built in. That and the generally poor selection of music on UK FM Stations.
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Under British law, there can be no changes in the use of the radio spectrum except those forced by the government. This is the only way that any change is possible. The "market" is not allowed to do anything.
Yes, the law is pretty retarded and about 30 years out of date, but it's easier to do it this way tha
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There's no such place in the UK. Ofcom are fairly tight about licensing, and always ensure they leave some spectrum available. Generally, you won't get a license for broadcasting on a slot that's in use in a neighbouring area, even when that signal isn't detectable with standard equipment in your area, simply because they don't want the potential of malfunctioning equip
"But Officer..." (Score:1)
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> same encoding, etc."
So? The story on Slashdot mentions iPods and MP3 formats, but it's unlikely the law will.
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Of course it doesn't; the law is solely concerned with the licensing of FM transmissions and transmitters.
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I own one of those (and live in Europe) (Score:1)
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Dang (Score:1)
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You'd be amazed how many people don't hit the Internet and buy something from abroad and just hope it gets through Customs if it's banned in their home country.
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Also, for a lot of people, cassette-shell adapters are a better choice. They don't pause the tunes when you get a traffic announcement, but they do at least allow the TA to come through.
ian
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Because I have a finite supply of money. Besides which, my car stereo doesn't have a CD multichanger port so I'd still have to replace it.
Wireless Telegraphy Act of 1949 (Score:1)
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Because, of course, the fundamental nature of radio interference changed in the 1980s.
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Pedantic (Score:1)
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I'm still using a transmitter I got off my dad to transmit my iPod to my stereo. That said, he got it off his father who bought it in 1937, so there may well be grandfather rights allowing it to be used in the intervening years.
Phew! (Score:1)
Gosh and to think of all the people must of anoyed within a 2 meter radius of my car by the awsome 50mW transmitter over ridding BBC 2 Radio.
Legal at last (Score:2)
I did have one other use for it though; last summer my neighbour would listen to Kiss FM radio (bland dance music that I hate) very loud while gardening. We tuned the trasmitter to the frequency of this radio station, waited for the current song to end, then started broadcasting over his signal, initialy
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Next time, hook up a white noise generator. Then you can watch him waste hours trying to re-tune his radio.
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What about line-in ports? (Score:1)
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[1] Nobody really went for in-deck CD players back then as it was before the days of chea
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Only some of them will be legal! (Score:3, Informative)
As it says in the BBC article [bbc.co.uk], only some devices will be legal.
Now certain FM transmitters, which can be tuned to spare frequencies, will be legal from 8 December.
However, many devices currently on the market will remain illegal as they do not meet the legally required technical specifications and could interfere with radio broadcasts.
All approved transmitters will carry a CE mark indicating approval for sale in the European Union.
So, as I see it, legal transmitters will not only have to meet strict power limits, but also be tunable only to certain spare frequencies in the FM band. I spent some time searching the Ofcom web site to try and find exact details of the regulations (e.g. which frequencies exactly), but without success. If anyone else can find them then I for one would be interested.
Detach car antenna for better reception (Score:2, Informative)
One way to fix this is to detach the aerial from the roof of your car, it should still receive your FM transmitter's signal but not get interference from FM radio stations.
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Plus it would invalidate my usual use of my mp3 player as something to switch to when something I REALLY detest makes a radio appearence.
Too much interference (Score:1)
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It has never been legal (Score:1)
The main reason was to prevent emergency and millitary channels being interefered with (remember in the UK in the last 40s, early 50s radio was still wired in to the home, not broadcast). To broadcast on across a frequency range, approval had to be sought (in part so the authorities could check there were no conflicts), then registered. At the time there were no thougts about power as incredibly short ra
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Wrong. So wrong I don't even know where to start. [wikipedia.org]
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It's possible that a small number of people, probably in new towns like Welwyn and Letchworth, had cable, but the BBC has always broadcast radio over the airwaves, and the use of a radio receiver has always been the way that the majority of people in the UK listened.
One rather neat (or weird) hack in the early days, when many radios were only equipped with headphones, was to place the headphones in a round goldfish bowl (having first removed the goldfish and water). The resonance of the bowl allowed it
Re:That's Too Bad (Score:5, Informative)
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"No, most all of them can be tuned to any frequency in the FM band."
GP is correct, at least until recently. For years I searched for an FM modulator that allowed tuning to anything above 89 or below 106. Recently full-range units have been increasingly available, but at least in my local area, the selection at the local electronics stores is still weighted toward the old-fashioned kind that are limited to the lower reaches.
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There are plenty of places that will sell you one here. You know, for use while you're travelling out of the country.
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Until well into this year, you could only get them from foreign ebay sellers.
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To suggest that just because using something would be illegal you can't actually buy it in the country is naive.
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Maybe you should be learning from this. Something like; I need to read more widely and pay more attention to the society and world about me.
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I find it bizarre that a person who claims to be "generally interested in radio communications" has never heard of the Wireless Telegraphy Act.
What about the Vorbis files, insensitive clods? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What about the Vorbis files, insensitive clods? (Score:5, Funny)
I hate it too, I mean sometimes they just act like the iPod nano and iPod shuffle don't exist
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