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08/08/2004 |
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Psion WaveFinder DAB Radio Iain Laskey tunes in to a neat gadget
There has been a quiet revolution bubbling away over the last few years that has managed to pass most people by. DAB or Digital Audio Broadcasting is the next generation of radio designed to oust FM from its throne as the state of the art in radio. As well as providing high quality digital audio, DAB has a few other tricks up its sleeve including the ability to transmit details about the current broadcast as well as web pages of information and simple multimedia games. There are dozens of stations already running including some exclusive to DAB such as Ministry of Sound or Planet Rock and no doubt more will appear in the future. The downside of DAB has historically been cost. The early tuners cost around £600 and even now, £300 is the baseline, indeed this gadget originally cost around that when it was first released. Psion has now dropped the price to a far more reasonable £99 and if you’re really quick, you might pick one up from your local PC World for half that although stocks are disappearing fast. Not all parts of the UK can receive DAB broadcasts so it is worth checking your area first by going to www.wavefinder.com and entering your postcode. I’m on the Essex coast and got all the BBC stations plus a large selection of others although the London based stations were a bit weak. Being digital, the reception either works or doesn’t work. You don’t get hissy reception from hard to receive stations. Hardware The box contains the main aerial block plus two wire extensions for the top and bottom that need to be screwed in to the block. The entire thing is just under 70cms long. You can then either position the aerial on top of your monitor or more ideally on to a nearby wall via the supplied sticky pads or screws. The aerial connects via USB to the PC. You then need to install the software to get things up and running. Tuning In The software uses the PC’s CPU to do the decoding so you need a reasonably racy PC of 400Mhz or more with 64Mb+ of RAM. The core software was written in Java which probably seemed like a good idea at the time but means it uses an awful lot of processor time. The first time you use the WaveFinder, it tries to find all the transmitters and stations it knows about and reports back the signal strength. You can then try different positions for the aerial and rescanning until you are happy you have the best quality. You’ll immediately notice that during use the aerial pulses different colours in a rather funky way. This sounds tacky but actually looks quite neat. The supplied software was v1.2 and a quick trip to the web site allowed an upgrade to v1.4. The interface is shall we say a little unusual. A large blank page appears covered in icons for the transmitters with stations scattered around them. You then click on the icon for the station you want to tune in to it. One of the strengths is the ability to record stations as either MP2 or MP3 audio. You can also set up timed recordings like a VCR to record programs whilst you are out which is a major boon for a Radio 4 listener like me! This is all well and good but as mentioned, the supplied software is rather a resource hog and a thriving user community has produced at least two alternatives in the form of DabBar (www.dabbar.co.uk) and Wavelite (www.todds-hanger.freeserve.co.uk). The latter costs £25 but the former is currently free. I have used DabBar and found it to be superior to the Psion offering in most respects and is the software I use daily although it doesn’t support all features just yet. Your sound card and speakers ultimately limit the sound quality. I have a SoundBlaster Live with a 5.1 speaker set and things sounded pretty good with no obvious problems. Speech sometimes sounded slightly sibilant but that may have been the source anyway. Music sounded full and exciting (Radio 1 and Virgin) and the usual FM test of Radio 3 resulted in a very acceptable sound. For better results you can of course connect your soundcard to your HiFi’s inputs but not many people have their PC near enough to the HiFi to make this viable. Conclusion. If you can still find this at £49 it’s a must have and even at £99 it’s a neat product but try out the alternative software to get the best out of the hardware. The recording options are a useful addition resulting in a useful and cheap way in to DAB radio. The flashing lights are cool too! |
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