Home FM transmitter question.

Lavane

Lavane

Lunatic Member
I'm thinking about getting a FM transmitter kit to stream music through all my tuners. This particular kit I'm looking at doesn't come with an antenna, chassis, etc.
My question is would a basic telescoping antenna work? This kit is adjustable from .5w to 7w output. I'm not looking to put up an outdoor antenna and broadcast to the whole neighborhood, just inside my house and maybe into my garage.
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I have a Ccrane FM Transmitter with a 12" telescoping antenna. It transmits through the whole house and garage just fine.
 
I'm only using it to air wifi radio feeds to small radios. Some of the feeds are fairly low rate to start with. All the hifi systems use the directional rooftop antenna which won't pick up the FM transmitter because it is located below the antenna.
 
These little inexpensive transmitters are used mostly for use with tuners in your home. Some of the more expensive low powered transmitters are used by churches, drive in movies, small public stations etc.
I'm just using one to stream internet music to my tuners. I have three systems setup in my home including the garage and soon one out on my covered deck. Instead of having a cable connected to each system and having to plug and unplug an old smart phone or pad to whatever system I'm listening to, I can just leave the phone connected to the transmitter.
 
Let me rephrase…If I have Van Halen song Hot for Teacher tuned in from a small fm transmitter in bedroom via FLAC file will it sound the same quality-wise as if I tuned Van Halen Hot for Teacher from 105.5 WXYZ across town?
 
eizner23 said:
Let me rephrase…If I have Van Halen song Hot for Teacher tuned in from a small fm transmitter in bedroom via FLAC file will it sound the same quality-wise as if I tuned Van Halen Hot for Teacher from 105.5 WXYZ across town?
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It should be better as you are not peak limiting and compressing the music. Frequency response will only go to 15KHz, but if you're old like me, you can't hear that high anymore anyway :)
 
Never used a Ccrain, but have had a Ramsey for years and with good quality feed to it will sound better than any broadcast. However you often have to mess with level of the signal. If the signal is to Hot you over modulate and distort. Unfortunately level change between different recording and streams.
 
something I need to do with my AM transmitter which would work on FM too is to add some compression in front of it. Not so much for the sake of the compression, but for automatic level adjustment and peak limiting. If the source is the computer you can probably find some software that will handle that for you. If the transmitter doesn't add the pre-emphasis you may be able to apply that too. I've mostly used my signal generators as short term transmitters and they just don't have any sort of audio processing ability so the results can be less than ideal. As a thing that makes signal with modulation they are great but its very much a garbage in, garbage out situation. They do make for a rather complex looking and expensive way to do the job too but for me its a case of "already got this".

at one point I had a Winamp plugin that could do all this. I was using my HP 8640B and the software was capable of generating the pilot tone to get me stereo and it fed in the proper mix with compression and all so it really did sound good at the other end of things.
 
gadget73 said:
something I need to do with my AM transmitter which would work on FM too is to add some compression in front of it. Not so much for the sake of the compression, but for automatic level adjustment and peak limiting. If the source is the computer you can probably find some software that will handle that for you. If the transmitter doesn't add the pre-emphasis you may be able to apply that too. I've mostly used my signal generators as short term transmitters and they just don't have any sort of audio processing ability so the results can be less than ideal. As a thing that makes signal with modulation they are great but its very much a garbage in, garbage out situation. They do make for a rather complex looking and expensive way to do the job too but for me its a case of "already got this".

at one point I had a Winamp plugin that could do all this. I was using my HP 8640B and the software was capable of generating the pilot tone to get me stereo and it fed in the proper mix with compression and all so it really did sound good at the other end of things.
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I loved Winamp.
 
Punker X said:
Never used a Ccrain, but have had a Ramsey for years and with good quality feed to it will sound better than any broadcast. However you often have to mess with level of the signal. If the signal is to Hot you over modulate and distort. Unfortunately level change between different recording and streams.
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The kit I bought has an adjustable input and output at leased. I had one several years ago that worked pretty well, but your right, some sources would need some adjusting.
 
Lavane said:
I'm thinking about getting a FM transmitter kit to stream music through all my tuners. This particular kit I'm looking at doesn't come with an antenna, chassis, etc.
My question is would a basic telescoping antenna work? This kit is adjustable from .5w to 7w output. I'm not looking to put up an outdoor antenna and broadcast to the whole neighborhood, just inside my house and maybe into my garage.
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.5w up to 7w and no dedicated antenna...it's not even close to legal. That's before you get to audio quality.

EV3
 
I started going down the rabbit hole of FM transmitters after going down the hole of TV transmitters. For TV I settled on a Blonder Tongue from Ebay, now I can watch TV on my vintage sets again, I think some of the models can broadcast radio as well, these were used for office buildings or schools so they could sync all of the TV sets. For radio I thought I'd just get something off of amazon but I was told the fidelity stinks, so I started looking for alternatives.

There seems to be a wide range of FM transmitters, my smallest is an JDM AIWA FMT-1, it plugs into a portable's headphone jack and is for sending the tape output to a tuner, it has a small range of frequency adjustments. Next would be the CC Crain Style,
VWestlife did some YouTube Videos of this type, they didn't sound to promising.


Personally I've started leaning towards a small Part 15 Style Unit
https://www.radiobrandy.com/
https://www.hobbybroadcaster.net/

This looks interesting but I don't think they're around anymore
https://www.edmdesign.com/

Then there's Cana Kit with a few different styles
https://www.canakit.com/fm-transmitters

and these guys seem to have the cool stuff, did they get rid of FM in Europe? It seems really popular over there.
https://www.pcs-electronics.com/product-category/fm-transmitters/fm-transmitter-kits/
 
evsentry3 said:
.5w up to 7w and no dedicated antenna...it's not even close to legal. That's before you get to audio quality.

EV3
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I have an antenna. I don't plan on adjusting the output to more than I need.
It has a bin connector, and I have a 20" telescoping antenna that will connect to it. I don't have any plans to transmit to the whole neighborhood.
 
Bone Yard said:
I started going down the rabbit hole of FM transmitters after going down the hole of TV transmitters. For TV I settled on a Blonder Tongue from Ebay, now I can watch TV on my vintage sets again, I think some of the models can broadcast radio as well, these were used for office buildings or schools so they could sync all of the TV sets. For radio I thought I'd just get something off of amazon but I was told the fidelity stinks, so I started looking for alternatives.

There seems to be a wide range of FM transmitters, my smallest is an JDM AIWA FMT-1, it plugs into a portable's headphone jack and is for sending the tape output to a tuner, it has a small range of frequency adjustments. Next would be the CC Crain Style,
VWestlife did some YouTube Videos of this type, they didn't sound to promising.


Personally I've started leaning towards a small Part 15 Style Unit
https://www.radiobrandy.com/
https://www.hobbybroadcaster.net/

This looks interesting but I don't think they're around anymore
https://www.edmdesign.com/

Then there's Cana Kit with a few different styles
https://www.canakit.com/fm-transmitters

and these guys seem to have the cool stuff, did they get rid of FM in Europe? It seems really popular over there.
https://www.pcs-electronics.com/product-category/fm-transmitters/fm-transmitter-kits/
Click to expand...
Thanks for the links. I'll definitely look them up. I didn't think the one in the video did too bad for just having the short wire for an antenna. I don't have a basement. I just plan to transmit to my living room, another room down the hall and my garage. I like the kits. I build my own tube amplifiers and preamps either from scratch or kits. Its just more fun than buying something off the shelf. I recently built a couple 125 watt tube mono blocks amps and several small tube guitar head amps. I built a single stage tube preamp just to see how it would sound using the leased amount of parts possible. It turned out to sound pretty good.
When I was in high school a freinds father liked restoring early B&W TV's. He ahead an old Edison he had restored that had the clearest picture I've ever seen in a B&W TV.
 
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I got sucked into watching VWestlife's Videos last night from a long time ago, he's been running a station forever with really nice gear but it looks like there isn't a lot of enthusiasm with the younger folks and the home-built community is shrinking. When I was a kid we always talked about putting together a pirate radio station.
 
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