FRED MANTEGHIAN BLOG

For less than half the price that my BMW dealer wants to hook my iPod to the 530i's stereo, you can use Belkin's TuneBase FM for iPod to hear your music collection through your car's FM radio. It's not an original idea and it's not a first, but it is extremely well designed and implemented. For the most part.

First the pluses. The unit plugs into what the Third World still refers to as a cigarette lighter and its gooseneck support twists, bends, rotates and, in general, greatly cooperates with your efforts to find just the perfect iPerch. I tried it in three different cars, with power connections forward of the console just under the radio (my car), dash (a Ford SUV) and a forearm's length away from the dash on the console (Volvo sedan). If you have one of those pop-up and fold-away power supplies, the combined weight of the iPod and the Belkin might make it rock forwards and backwards when you hit the brakes. Hence the inelegant, but completely effective, Tic Tac wedge.

The Belkin TuneBase has four FM frequency memory settings plus two controls for scrolling through all FM frequencies, although 87.7 and 87.9 are missing at the very bottom of the band. That leads us to one of life's great ironies. The better your radio, at least in respect with how many stations it can pull in, the worse for the Belkin. In order for the TuneBase to work effectively, you need to find an FM frequency setting that not only doesn't pull in any stations, it should be as close to silent as you can find.

With the Volvo S40, that turned out to be impossible. That car has no muting circuitry to reject noise – it's the wide open spaces all the way. In other words, you get something on every station setting, even if it is only loud static. Start playing your iPod on a noisy station and you get, yup, noisy music.

The BWM has a better radio all around than the Volvo, pulling in stations clearly and doing a slightly better job of muting. But it's still an overachiever and unoccupied stations are subject to hiss. Fortunately, I found one frequency setting, 107.7 that is very quiet everywhere along my drive to work. However, the BMW being a BMW, I do get to hear some engine noise in the background when the music is very quiet. When it's not, I don't, so it's not a deal killer

The Ford Explorer, eight years old, born with possibly the worse AM section ever created (you can hear engine noise from your car and the car passing you) and an FM section that doesn't pull in many stations. But those that do come in, come in very well. The final result? The TuneBase works best with the car I'll be driving in the winter.

Listen for frequency response. With the BMW, my high-bit encoded AAC files sounded a little rolled off above the midrange. Pumping up the treble a few clicks restored the tonality I hear with AKG headphones. In the Ford, however, flat sounded right. The Belkin itself may not be flat to 15 kHz, but correcting it was easy enough.

The TuneBase charges the iPod while you're listening. If the cigarette lighter has power when the engine is off, it will keep charging your iPod while you're parked (the BWM and the Ford) or not (the Volvo). But YOU have to remember to turn off your iPod when you get to your destination. If you don't, the hard drive will cycle through your record collection for eight hours while you're at work. Needless wear and tear.

Belkin has a great little product in the TuneBase FM. There are a few variables to its success in your car, but if you can find one or two quiet FM stations in your area, you're virtually guaranteed it will satisfy you for not much money. If you already hear engine noise (electrical, transmission or turbo-charging) on your car's FM band, you'll still hear it with the TuneBase. It's not a panacea.

Hardwiring is the only solution for totally noise-free operation of your iPod, a non-inconsequential consideration, but the Belkin is an inexpensive piece of instant gratification with the added bonus of true portability.

My tunes from iTunes to my car. As painlessly as could be.