Kensington Digital FM Transmitter/Car Charger for iPod

After I realized that I was gonna have to go the route of the FM transmitter to play my ipod in my car, I did tons of research. I must say that this unit sounds really well, if you configure it right. The first thing you need to to is set your ipod EQ to "treble reducer" or "small speakers". (I have yet to figure out why the EQ affects the sound through the dock/line out, but the volume control doesn't) The high end sounds will break up and annoy the crap out of you if you dont! Then you have to have multiple stations to work with. I find myself switching presets once every couple of car rides depending on where I go in town. I live in Louisville, KY and there are plenty of free stations which work well. While you can scroll down to 87.9 by holding down the right two preset buttons and scrolling, I have found this to be useless where I live. Stations higher in the band are overridden much easier than this one for some reason. Also, as with all fm transmitters, there will be...Read more

I have the Kensington 33185 in one car and the iCarPlay Plus in the other. While the iCarPlay Plus is decent, the Kensington wins out.

First, the Kensington has better reception, which I believe is largely due to it being tunable. You can set it to any station on the FM radio frequency so you get to control which station works best for you in your given area. The iCarPlay Plus has three stations pre-set and they can not be changed, so if those three are being used in your area by high-power FM stations you're out of luck. Luckily, I can use the three pre-sets in my area because there are no high-powered broadcasts on those stations already, but the Kensington still sounds better.

Second, the Kensington's controls are molded into the unit that plugs into the cigarette lighter while the iCarPlay Plus' controls are separate. This is a problem for the iCarPlay Plus because the unit tends to get flung around during sharp turns or lost between the seat and...Read more

The idea of playing your iPod through your car's FM radio is a good one. And it works well if you are basically staying in one place. You can identify a frequency with no signal, set your transmitter to that, and you're fine.

However, it's very painful to use on long trips, since as you travel you move into areas where your chosen frequency is no longer empty and you begin to hear lots of static. At that point, you have to start looking around for another frequency. In a recent trip (from New England to Pittsburgh), sometimes we were lucky and didn't have to change for an hour and a half. At other times, we wound up searching for new free frequencies every 20 minutes or so. This was annoying with two of us in the car; it would have been near impossible if there was only the driver.

What one of these devices really needs is a "seek" function that works the opposite the way the radio's seek function works. The radio seeks to the next solid station. It would...Read more