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In article ,
(John P) wrote:

I purchased an iTrip while in San Francisco at the Apple WWDC (at end
of June) for use in the UK where, as far as I know, they are not
available. My experience was that it had a maximum range of about 3 ft
and the method they use for changing the frequency simply does not
work.

I've done 3 metres (out of the alleged 10...haven't tried further)
without issue. The tuning mechanism has not failed for me.

The device appears to draw all it power from the stereo jack. Before I
purchased it, I assumed it took power from the Firewire socket, but
there are no connections. This implies that the power output is
limited by the audio output, which it must convert to DC.

No. Look carefully at the connection. There's an additional line that is
specifically intended to support power transmission.

This is a bit worrying because an FM signal is constant amplitude so
I dont know it copes with low audio signal levels. On mine it doesnt
seem to cope at all.

That may be part of the problem you had tuning. I found that for the
iTrip to work reliably (and this is documented) I had to set the volume
to a much higher level than is comfortable with earphones.

The method they use to change the transmission frequency is to supply
a lot of MP3 files with tune names of the desired frequency (e.g.
97.5). When you "play" the tune with the iTrip connected, it decodes
the tunes as a special instruction to change the frequency. Although
the light flashed indicating something was happening, it failed to
change the frequency.

You also have to stop playback (again, as documented) when the light
starts flashing. The tuning tracks start with a sequence that tells the
iTrip to change the frequency, but finish with a sequence that tells it
to cancel the tuning request. The change doesn't take if it hears the
cancel signal within several seconds. This is protection against
unintentionally playing one of the tuning tracks.

G

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