I’ve been getting more and more annoyed at the radio stations I can receive on my car stereo.
I used to listen to Smooth Radio, mainly because they used to play some classic rock, but its appalling technical problems drive me to distraction. Smooth specialises in dead silences, songs jumping from one to another, music and news playing at the same time, news just being 60 seconds of dead silence when you were specifically waiting for it (followed by adverts as if nothing untoward had just happened), and many many more besides.
Smooth’s other claim to fame was that it didn’t just keep playing the same songs over and over. Well, that’s only part true. Admittedly, it doesn’t do it like most local radio stations do – a playlist of about 30 songs that just get repeated throughout the day – but there’s really only so much Michael Bublé and Rod Stewart you can stomach. Then they got rid of a load of half-decent presenters when they recently went national and replaced them with people who are not good DJs and who tried to pretend they were “local” – you could hear the joins a mile off as they switched to the news.
As a result of this I started spending more time listening to BBC 5 Live. No music on there, but good for sport (when you want it) and listening to idiots on phone-in shows. But being on medium wave (MW) means you lose it if you go under a bridge, or find yourself listening to Radio Seychelles if you go near an overhead power cable. And it sounds like someone’s shooting at you with a machine gun if you go near a tramline or electrical substation (amazing how many of those there are hidden behind houses and other buildings).
5 Live on MW has a big drawback. It’s run by the BBC, and that means what I consider to be “balanced coverage” (i.e. every Arsenal match live) is not the same as what the BBC does (i.e. golf, rugby, and football matches involving Man Utd., Chelsea, and other teams). This means that 5 Live Extra is a must-have – it’s the place where the stuff displaced by golf and rugby gets relegated to
One other drawback to 5 Live is that once the sun goes down the only station you can’t receive on 693 medium wave is 5 Live! How do those foreign stations get so much power to be able to do that?
Now, I’ve had a DAB radio at home for a couple of years. I don’t listen to radio much except in the car, but the Pure Evoke-2XT is excellent at getting me up in the morning. It is loud, and has an alarm. And it has Planet Rock.
Planet Rock is brilliant. It plays proper rock music, and apart from bands like Pearl Jam or the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, there is no NO RAP. Rush gets played more times in a single day on Planet Rock than they have on all other stations put together over the whole of the last 35 years!
A couple of years ago, DAB was hit and miss. Reception was patchy at best, and certainly not something that would work in the car. But times have changed, and you can now buy DAB radios for cars – some even have it fitted as standard.
I did some research, and in the end plumped for the Pure Highway DAB Radio and an external magnetic aerial (you get a stick on windscreen mounted one with the radio as standard). It also works as a portable DAB radio.
Performance in-car is superb. I’ve got wall-to-wall coverage throughout Nottinghamshire, and when I’ve travelled through the Cotswolds down to Wiltshire I’ve not found any dead areas at all. And it’s already paid for itself by giving me advance warning of the Rush tour next year, which I wouldn’t have found out about for weeks otherwise!
I got mine from Amazon. It costs just over £60. I’d recommend it to anyone (DAB signal permitting in your area). It fits in ANY car.