Home > Consumer Reviews > Fm Radio Compactflash Card

This is a pretty nice device for the price paid. The signal quality however, sometimes suffers when I am indoors, but that happens with my oter FM player as well. Overall a nice product if you use your PDA a lot. The good thing is that it comes with a PCMCIA adapter as well and can be used with the laptop.

Disclaimers: So far I've only tried the FM-CF in a laptop (Dell Latitude D600, WinXP Pro). If I get around to trying it in an iPAQ, and my impression improves, I'll repost. I have only used it in Sarasota, Florida, where there are a few local stations, but most are 30+ miles away (Tampa, St. Petersburg), albeit with flat topography.

Reception is worse than with my car's radio, my home receiver, or a Sangean SR-2 analog tuner pocket radio (which is itself far from great). Of the few stations that the FM-CF will tune, almost all are noisy. Of the latter, some become tolerable when one forces monophonic operation. There is no provision for setting a signal to noise ratio (SNR) threshold.

The Win32 control application (v1.1) is gaudily colored and not skinable. Many of the button labels use serif fonts and small typeface, neither of which can be changed. The preset buttons display only the station's frequency; there is no provision to label the buttons with the respective station's call letters. Overall, it's hard on half-century-old eyes.

The control app. provides one configuration setting, "Radio System", with three options:
- USA (88-108 MHz)
- Europe (87.5-108 MHz)
- Japan (76-91 MHz)
Perplexingly, that setting does not localize the carrier frequencies and channel spacing. Having selected USA, I would have expected the tuner to only stop at odd multiples of 100 kHz (0.1 MHz). Instead, it stops every 100 kHz, whether manually stepping or automatically seeking.

Ambicom does not offer a Software Developer's Kit (SDK), or an Application Programmer's Interface (API) to the device driver. Hence, writing a better control program appears improbable. Nor are Linux or BSD flavors supported by Ambicom.

My advice would be to pass on this product and apply your thirty+ bucks toward a pocket radio, perhaps a digitally tuned Sangean (which'll cost you another twenty).

I've changed two or three radios for PDAs, but this one is exceptional. There's a great advantage using this one: the PCMCIA card who fits into laptop may be used for any other SD card that you may want to plugin into your laptop (but you dont have a PCMCIA2SD card).

The receiver is exceptional, there's a nice program for your desktop from which you change FM stations (it's FM only) and it's quite precised (1 digit precision, i.e. 97.8, 97.9, 98.0 etc)

There's a small hole in the back of the radio which connects to either earphones or your laptop's line-in (so you can hear your music from your laptop).

I've heard stations with relatively weak signal quite good with this card, and I also managed to listen weather station (plus news) from inside a flight recently.

I think it's also wisely priced, so, to me, it's an exceptional buy..

It is a good solution for those who wants to listen to radio in addition to their MP3s. I have used it on a DELL 610 laptop and a iPAQ 3750 with expansion sleeve. The reception is significantly better with the laptop than the iPAQ. The user interfaces for both are the same, which is good. One bonus is the basic, but, free PCMCIA card comes with it.

On the flip side, the disappointments are: 1) no room left to plug-in for both my Compact Flash wireless card and it together for the laptop. 2) To boost reception of FM station's signal, one has to plug their headphone to this card, rather than the iPAQ or laptop's built-in line out. 3) missing record button to record what is broadcasting from the FM station. 4) missing Short wave and AM.

All and all, it is good.

I use this mainly as a radio for my notebook. It's not billed as such, but the PC software is on the CD also. You get a line-in cable, and if you have a line-in jack and a CF slot or a CF slot adapter like me, then you can play a radio without slowing down your dial-up connection. Also, it doesn't use up desk space, except for a few inches protrusion from the CF card. I lost the software when I closed down my computer without shutting down the cool-looking on screen tuner. A deinstall/reinstall didn't do the trick, so I had to use system restore on Windows XP to get it back.
It works fine on my Toshiba e750 ppc as well. Reception is average, so only count on getting strong stations. The on-screen tuning is the easiest and most accurate radio tuning, though.