Belkin TuneCast II FM Transmitter for MP3 Players (Black)

 (533 customer reviews)

After reading the reviews I was a bit trepidacious about this item. It seems like a lot of people have difficulty getting satisfactory performance, but I really wanted to be able to use my mp3 player in the car so I grabbed one with the expectation that it might be marginal. Sure enough, out of the box it had pretty poor FM reception in both of my cars. I moved it around in the car and tried various 'blank' stations, but the unit would dropout and could be static-y even when reception was relatively good. Moving it around in the car has a big impact on performance, so the problem is pretty clearly just low transmistter power competing with big city radio interference (I live in the bay area, which has a LOT of radio stations). As an engineer I'm generally OK with working around the limitations of a gadget but I found this product pretty trying in its virgin state.

So I decided to see what sort of 'enhancement' it would take to bring it up to snuff. My first approach...Read more

I had been looking for a good FM Tuner to use with my Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen Xtra. I had heard good reviews about this product so I picked it up. Now, I wasn't expecting crystal clear CD-quality sound, but I was expecting something listenable, which explains my dissatisfaction with this product.

The product is easy enough to use. You plug the Belkin into the headphone or line out jack of your player, then find a poor quality radio station, tune your Belkin to it, and hit play. The Belkin can run on 2 AAA batteries or off your car's cigarette lighter. My first problem with it, is that the cigarette lighter adapter would not fit securely into the Belkin. It fell out at the slightest touch, as the hole in the Belkin was just too big. I either had to tape it in their, or had to run off the batteries, which run down surprisingly quick.

My next problem, is with the general size of the device. The cord that connects the Belkin to your audio player is about 3...Read more

I picked the Belkin Tunecast II up a few weeks ago before driving cross country from Brooklyn to Wisconsin (about a 14 hour car ride). I had recently bought a Rio Karma mp3 player and wanted to use it on the journey. Having just got back from my trip, I couldn't be happier with how the Belkin performed. I was driving a 1994 Saturn SL2 with a Sony Xplod CD player and placed the Rio/Belkin devices on the passenger seat where they would be in easy reach if I had to change the radio frequency. Surprisingly, the Belkin was tuned to 88.3 without incident for my entire journey through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin (including several major cities such as New York, Newark, Chicago and Milwaukee). I was expecting a lower sound quality filled with the occasional burst of static, but that was not the case. My entire car ride was static free and the music could only have sounded better if I had brought along my CD collection. Needless to say, I'm...Read more