Car Radio Adpater??

So who has a cassette player? Even my 4 year old peekup track has a CD player.

...Jim Thompson

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|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

One common adapter used the Rohm BA1404 FM stereo chip for the whole thing, but that chip is no longer in production. It has often been replaced by the NJM2035. Here are all the gory details.

Or else they use another Rohm chip, the BH1414 or BH1416 which is PLL and much better. Nowadays with FM radios that only step in 200 kHz increments, the PLL seems to be necesary to keep on channel. See

All these RF generators are supposed to adhere to the FCC part 15 limits for intentional radiators, blah-blah, etc.

The local car boombox hopup shop installs the gizmo in the antenna lead under the dash, puts a wire in the fusewbox, etc. No biggie.

If there's a cassette player, you can buy fake cassettes with coupling transformers in them for not too much money. They have gearing in them to fool most cassette players into allowing them to stay in place. Best Buy sells them ("Monster" brand, IIRC) for use with iPods, for example. I think about 20 dollars. Sound quality???

Okay, here it is:

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

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"it's the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
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Both of our cars do, but they're more 4 years old. Remember the expensive CD options that fit in the trunk? I've got a nice library of jazz on cassettes.

There are in-dash CD/MP3 players that are pretty reasonable (

Hi Jim,

I just saw one of these at a barber shop. Size was about the diameter of a small beer coaster. The sound was great, like CD. Usually the good adapters have a PLL, don't buy one with a tuning coil or cap. Most only offer four channels via a couple dip switches but these are in the 88MHz section where most stations are lower power. So interference should be ok, at least most of the time.

I don't know about 'adpaters' though ;-)

You are right about cassette players. We record our church service for people that are too sick to come. Often we run into the problem that even 70 or 80 year old folks don't have cassette players anymore.

Regards, Joerg

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Spehro Pefhany wrote:

Actually, the 'transformer' is simply another cassette head in the adaptor which presses aginst that in the unit and couples its flux into the replay head.

They can work quite well.

My recently acquired car CD player also has a 3.5mm jack for an auxiliary input which is sensible.

Graham

I got one of these gadgets which plugs into the cig-lighter and, while not hi-fi, still works fairly well. Its frequency is fixed at 107.9MHz and cannot be changed. On mine, it has an uncommited 7805 inside which I've used to power my MP3 player as well - with beefed up heat-sinking.

Mike

I wondered the same thing when I was contemplating XM radio, and later contemplating installing a computer in my 2001 Ford Explorer to do MP3s and GPS and whatever else might be fun.

I didn't want to use an FM modulator because I've never been satisfied with the sound quality.

But the factory in dash CD player can control an external 6 disc changer made by Ford. So you know it has line inputs. But there's no way to just select the line inputs. It has to think there's actually a changer connected to the dash unit.

I had thoughts of pulling the radio out and doing some reverse engineering, but I figured that would be difficult without actually having the changer so I could observe how they worked together.

Then by the power of google, I found a company that make a box that plugs into the changer input and has line input jacks. Apparently it fools the dash unit into thinking it's a changer and then feeds in whatever you plug into it.

Unfortunately I either forgot to bookmark the site, or it's in there somewhere with my other thousands of bookmarks lost like a needle in a haystack.

Googling found this which looks similar but is not the site I found before:

Look for the Aux2Car.

Carl Smith

Behold, Jim Thompson signalled from keyed 4-1000A filament:

No kiddin'! My '91 Tempo doesn't even have a cassette. Can't even buy them anymore in this neck of the woods. Even CD's are being replaced with DVD-A.

--
Gregg t3h g33k
"Ratings are for transistors....tubes have guidelines"
http://geek.scorpiorising.ca

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Jim Thomps> >

[snip]

Hi Carl, Thanks for the tip! That won't work for Nissan, but it's certainly a good guide as to what to look for. Thanks again!

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Hi Jim,

I built something like this for my Grand Prix a few months ago when the tape deck broke in my GM Delco cassette/radio. It's a little pc board that plugs right over the DSP chip in the radio where the cassette deck ribbon cables would normally connect.

I've noticed that the delcos are modular (delcos with a CD player only use the same PCB as the declos with a cassette deck only) so in theory this should still work for more recent stereos with only a CD player. I'm sure that at some point the PCBs will be revised (if they haven't been already) and the tape connectors will no longer be included, so this solution will no longer work.

So if you happen to have a GM car with a delco in it, you might find this useful:

Cheers, Chris

Dunno, however one of the time capsules buried in the ground next to the flagpoles on our campus has a VHS tape in it. Scary part is when it's unearthed, will there be a player still available?

At least it wasn't a betamax!

It won't matter. My experience with tape that sits for *many* years is that it sticks to itself and can't be unwound. I had some ancient backup tapes go bye-bye that way :-(

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

JIm,

I would go with the FM modulator. The Cassette Tape adaptors may not work, depending on the tape transport mechanics. ie; if the tape does a vertical drop when inserted.

Cheers

[snip]

Please don't tell me that they might discontinue 8-track tapes.

--
Paul Hovnanian     mailto:Paul@Hovnanian.com
------------------------------------------------------------------
Telemark:  If it was easy, they'd call it snowboarding.

Those things sucked, sound quality wise at least. There seems to be a big stock pile of them around, mostly in various transmitters.

Much better, but still lacking. Also no final RF stage.

When I get around to finishing it, I'm building a transmitter with one of those IC's. There is one more model: BH1414. Two come with a microprocessor interface. One comes with all kinds of bells and whistles, that's the one I'm working with. The other ones can be set with dip switches. They tend to use a few oddball parts, like the crystal freq, the variactor spec's, etc. Two things to note: No MPX filter in the data sheet design, and there was something with the way the stereo signal was created, which could have been done a lot better.

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No RF whatsoever, which keeps it out of the rest of the circuit.

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That's what I said above.

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If you read the URL I gave, you would get all those details. Buy a kit with all the parts already in it. Then make your mods.

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In my experience, the sad fact seems to be that the only folks who'll actually give you specs for their transmitters are... the exciters/transmitters that are typically used by the folks in the low power FM/pirate radio arena!

There's a guy on eBay who's been selling his own homebrew FM transmitters for awhile now that has a decent web site with its specs:

. Sooner or later the FCC might get him since his products have an obvious 'wink wink, nudge nudge' factor involved (they're clearly in violation of FCC regulations if you, uh... attach an antenna!), but the fact that he seems to have a good grasp of the engineering considerations involved is promising. (As far as I can tell, Ramsey electronics has made considerable inroads towards becoming a 'reputable' manufacturer, and they started off selling devices into similar markets.)

I'd love to find consumer electronics such as TVs and DVD players having ANY real detailed technical specifications included on them, but I'm not holding my breath...

---Joel Kolstad