Can I buy a portable digital radio the size of a 'Walkman'?

Does anyone know if they exist and if they do where I can purchase one? Dick Smith and JB don't have any as of yet.

Charles L

Reply to
Charles L
Loading thread data ...

I got an MP3 player much smaller than a walkman and it has an FM radio.

Herc

Reply to
|-|erc

He said *digital*.

With the CPU, logic decoding and the rest, there's lots of hardware overhead there, would likely be a while before we see the size of digital sets approaching the size of current smaller crop of FM receivers.

--
Linux Registered User # 302622
Reply to
John Tserkezis

Sony have one for $449:

formatting link
Due this month.

Dave.

--
---------------------------------------------
Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast:
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
David L. Jones

Funny that, because you can get a dual-channel digital TV receiver in a USB stick format. The radios will come, they just have a smaller market. It's nothing to do with the chip size. Some of these USB receivers have an ARM9 processor in them, so they could be easily programmed as radios instead of TVs.

Clifford Heath.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

Current consumption will be a big issue for portable devices. Atmel's DAB receiver front end chip for example takes anywhere from 0.25W up to 0.6W on it's own. Throw in the rest and it's no wonder Sony's DAB player only gets 9 hours max from a set of AA's.

Dave.

--
---------------------------------------------
Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast:
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
David L. Jones

Reading this, my instant response is that it must be just a software limitation, aka picking up the frequency and decoding the signal.

Oh wait. thinking of FM being in the middle of the TV bands and analogue TV cards which gave you TV or Radio depending on software.

As my cobolt set top boxen picks up the digital radio signals (some of?) leads me to ask if all digital radio signals are in the TV bands?

--
Great advances in Debian Linux; post a bug report and get spam in three 
days.
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
terryc

Leading Edge have a very nice little digital radio - the Digitech AR1745

Bought mine a few months ago and am very pleased with it - covers AM FM and SW, with about 200 memory spots. My FM comes from 50km away and reception is great.

Runs on 2x AAs or external 3v, has internal speaker and headphone out. Has clock, alarm etc as well

All this in a very compact package for $50!

Got mine from Leading Edge Wagga - love it

David

Reply to
David

Looks nice, is also sold under its original branding as Redsun RP300, but it's a digitally-tuned analog radio, not a digital radio.

Frankly I can't for the life of me work out what's wrong with analog radio that we need to ditch it and replace all our old receivers with digital ones. Pointless waste of money.

Clifford Heath, VK3CLF.

Reply to
Clifford Heath

"Clifford Heath"

** Analogue radio (FM) is very wasteful of bandwidth - just like analogue TV is too.

Changing to DTV has allowed a 5 or 6 fold increase in the number of high quality TV signals available in the same parts of RF spectrum. It has also eliminated "ghosting" and noise in the picture plus and most electrical inteference annoyances caused by the fact the signal is analogue. Antennas are also much smaller in capital city locations.

Digital radio provides similar advantages in economy of spectrum use and signal quality. It will also eventually allow a big chunk of the VHF band ( 88 to 108MHz) to be put to other uses.

Be a shame to lose AM band radio though, would mean the end of super simple recivers like "crystal sets".

Every second kid still builds one of them - right ???

.... Phil

Reply to
Phil Allison

That's not a digital radio. The OP is obviously talking about DAB digital radio:

formatting link
formatting link

Dave.

--
================================================
Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast:
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
David L. Jones

You bring up an interesting point. What will the schools of tomorrow bring?

Ok boys and girls, today, we're going to build a digital radio receiver: First we have to learn about radio theory, Then digital. Then RF design in the commercial radio band Digital design in logic, microprocessor, and DSP. Embedded software design, and audio stream decompression techniques. On the hardware side, first we learn about basic soldering. Then PCB manufacture, Then surface mount soldering. Easy, that bit should only take about a decade or so.

The hard bit is the encryption, because we would be violating any number of licences to teach you about the very last critical bit that would make your radio useful at all.

Since that technique is not viable, we'll do it the easy way. We'll get you to go to the Aldi's around the corner and buy a $25 receiver from them.

If you manage installing the batteries and getting it to work, we'll consider it a pass.

--
Linux Registered User # 302622
Reply to
John Tserkezis

It simply stimulates the economy, unfortunately mainly the Chinese one though.

MrT.

Reply to
Mr.T

It all started to go downhill when they went from Morse code to analog. The world is doomed!

Reply to
Davo

If only. I spent weeks trying to enthuse a young relative with electronics. Things like flashing LEDs and PIC programming didn't cut it. Nothing other than a fully fledged robot would do.

It's a whole new world guys. Get used to it.

Reply to
Bruce Varley

I agree with there Phil, but fortunately some schools seem to have even taken a step up from the humble crystal set as a project - I note that some are setting projects for kids using a PicAxe - great stuff as these projects encourage the basic skills of soldering, and electromechanical design and construction etc (eg making a PicAxe controlled robot) as well as programming.

David

Reply to
David

Yeah, kinda sad, but times move on. Actually hacking and DIY projects are gaining a HUGE following again, not pure electronics hobby stuff as such, but there is at least some of that. Just look at the massive popularity of MAKE magazine, the Maker faire each year, various hacked gadget forums, Hack-a-Day etc. An impressive number of these people are young kids, and plenty of girls too! It seems trendy to take stuff apart, hack things, and build your own stuff etc. This seemed to have only happened in the last 5 years or so, it seemed practically non-existant to the mainstream kids before then.

Dave.

--
================================================
Check out my Electronics Engineering Video Blog & Podcast:
 Click to see the full signature
Reply to
David L. Jones

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.