UKC

I am a few years behind the times on this.
My previous 2 car stereos were of the "radio cassette" variety and I had one of those pretend tapes with a wire to 3.5mm jack so I could plug a CD player or mp3 player in.

Now I have a CD player in the car.
You can guess the rest from the OP, "recommend me a blah blah, cheap please" Petrol stations sometimes sell them cheaply, are they rubbish? What are the criteria I need to look out for? I assume they are all now legal.

(funnily enough the thing I most want to do is plug my cassette Walkman(*) in OK I could spend the money on something to digitise my tapes but where's the quasi-Luddite, Heath-Robinsonesque charm in that ehh)

* not strictly a Walkman, it is a Panasonic

Ta!

In reply to Blue Straggler:

I had one from Belkin which was ok, but it was pretty fiddly and around big cities there is no chance of finding a decent channel. I also use a Pure highway digital radio that allows you to connect an ipod through it and that works well because it does a search for you and finds the strongest channel. If you can find a small, cheap device with a search facility like that then your sorted. I haven't found one, but good luck. I tend to still take a stack of cds with me and enjoy having a limited choice of old favs, it certainly saves alot of faff.

In reply to Blue Straggler: griffin things go into cigarette charger and use FM station into ipod - it also charges it up as it goes which is handy.

had one for about 2 years and it works great

In reply to Blue Straggler: I have found that they depend a lot on where the aerial is in the car. I know this sounds daft, but we had a hire car in the US that had the aerial mounted just above the boot window and the reception was rubbish. In the van the aerial is a wire embedded in the windscreen, and reception is brilliant.

In reply to spacey:

Yes there is the "just take CDs" thing, I enjoy the same "charm". Indeed, as I said in the OP, this is more to do with wanting to play a few old fave tapes

My gf has the Belkin one. It also charges the ipod and has 4 preset stations so you can set them to empty channels in your area and switch between them if you start to get interference.

In reply to Blue Straggler:

Just took a Belkin job on a roadtrip to and from Font. Generally it worked very well, but definitely needed a lot of shifting around on some road stretches to find a clear signal which would have been fairly tricky for a driver without a passenger. That said, the French airwaves seemed really crowded and there was no problem in London.

Antennae position will have a big impact; we could usually get much better signal by holding the transmitter against the radio, presumably getting round the problem.

In reply to Blue Straggler: I had the Belkin one but it (as you know) recently stopped working (after < one year) leaving me with only a single Transvision Vamp cassette and a shortly-afterwards-lost first aid kit cassette.

In reply to amanonaspeedingbike:

I had the same issue.

In hindsight, mine may have stopped working due to being slammed repeatedly inside the glove locker, who knows.

In reply to Adders: the griffin one does not need to keep changing stations. it works all the time for me.

In reply to control freak:

Soon to be remedied, as you know!

In reply to control freak:
>

I've heard that line before, but they weren't talking about a Belkin transmitter...

In reply to Blue Straggler: Can't you plug your walkman into your computer and "record" the tapes into digital, then stick em on a CD?

I've just moved over from cassette car stereo to CD too - some songs just don't sound the same without the pops and crackles from the original vinyl, overlayered with the hiss of a dolbyless cassette. Having more than 1 watt per channel outweighs any nostalgia though!

In reply to Blue Straggler:

I found my copy of the big black and the blue btw!

In reply to Blue Straggler:
You just need to be careful not to get one specifically designed for an ipod as they have (as well as the 3.5mm plug) a connector strip on that picks up power from the ipod.

Any that are designed for personal stereos should come with a lead to connect to your 12v power outlet (or cigarette lighter as they used to be called)