FM Transmitter company to stay away from.

[Chris A]

Jeff,

Thank you for sharing your experience. I looked up the Ebay store and I'm wondering if the .5W is comparable in output to the Ramsey FM30b.

Thanks, Chris

[NkySpike65]

Jeff Millard wrote:

David,

I wasn't posting in response to something you said.

It's alright, I understand were your coming from...



I just don't want others to think, that I'm trying to play king of the hill...

[mnkyboy]

Nonick22 wrote:

Dan, I will keep you and the rest of the community up to date. The transmitter I got was the R-FM25B-WT by Ramsy. The problem I had was with one song I had during some chimes the sound would get very distorted. I tried several sources of the same song (the computer, CD player and mp2 player) and always got the same result. When played thru any other speakers it played fine and a different transmitter I had (not a powerful enough one) it worked fine. The second one I got gave me the same trouble. I sent the song to Lynda and she played it on the transmitter I returned and said she did not have an issue. Has anyone had an issue where a specific song will not play properly on a certain transmitter.

Distorted audio?? Did you call Ramsey Directly?? I did, and the techs there are wonderful.. I built my kit the other night and all worked fine but had a slight distortion in the audio.. I called the next day, got "Pat" on the other end, we discussed a few things then recomended me turing r 25/r28 down to minimum, set the audio up then adjust till you just to start to over modulate or "clip" the signal, then back down just a tad. This made a night and days difference! Yes you will have to take the cover off to do this... but it is really simple...

Pat The tech explained if I was trying create that "Hot Jammin " fm station sound like the commercial radios stations.., not gonna happen without megadollar worth of compression/equalization equiptment. he explained in detail how the TX works and that It wont be as loud when listening with a radio like your local stations,and you will have to turn the volume up a bit more in the car, BUT it will still sound very good.

[taybrynn]

Jeff,

I'm really glad you did post. Because you sound extremely qualified to comment on this, even if your story doesn't agree with others here. I had been reading on other boards, like the part15 and several lower powered radio boards ... and they kind talked about Ramsey they way people used to talk about brands like Audiovox and Kraco. Yeah they work, but lower end products for a certain market.

As you know, I'm very interested in the EDM products and just got mine yesterday. I'm hopeful that this will be a quality alternative to the h-k (chinese) transmitters. I will be writing my own review on it in the next month.

My main gripe with the h-k tranmitters is that they are grossly overpowered for the job of transmitting a 200-300' for a light show and MAY have some quality issues and/or undesirable side effects that increase your overall risk of using the unit to un-necessarily high levels.

My MAIN gripe with them is that China reverse engineers products from the real companies (that actually did the r&d and engineering) and then makes a quick and cheap product to overtake the legitimate players in the market at below market cost. I would not care that they are the low price leader, but they do not obey international rules on copyright infringement and patents ... and by purchasing a h-k unit, we are indirectly supporting this form of government sponsored piracy of intellectual property.

So I don't care if you or others have one of these h-k transmitter units ... as it sounds like the generally DO work well ... but I'd hope that EDM would become a better budget-minded alternative in the long run, because its not grossly overpowered, is competitively priced and is of a much higher audio quality, which is what I am hearing from many folks way more qualified than myself. And they follow the same rules that all countries should.

THe folks over at EDM have already agreed to give PC members a 10% discount if we buy 10 or more units at a time. Don't go expecting to save 10%, but we could do a group by real easily, if we wanted to. They would offer a 20% discount if we created 10 units per month for a year ... but that wouldn't be too hard to do, I think.


Similar to Ramsey, the EDM techs are a pleasure to work with and very responsive.

[DaveK]

I am the General Manager of a six radio station group and I use a Ramsey FM radio for my holiday display. My engineer assembled the kit and I put together an antenna from Ramsey. Both work flawlessly and within FCC limitations and regulation.

Commercial broadcasting stations do sound louder…that is because we spend tens of thousands of dollars on audio processing. Much of the dynamic ranges (difference between loud passages and quiet passages) is lost. That is done because the listener does not want to have to reach over and crank up the volume knob during the pianissimo passages of a song. So the audio is compressed and equalized to a relatively constant level.

That is also why commercials sound loud on TV compared to the regular program audio. The audio on the commercial is compressed and limited to a constant level. Equalization is also optimized for maximum audibility for average hearing.

The Ramsey transmitters do seem somewhat prone to over saturation especially in frequencies above 16 kHz. I run my audio thru a mixer with an equalizer to roll off the high frequencies (as well as extremely low frequencies…below 40 kHz). Car radios are not manufactured to reproduce these ranges of frequencies anyway. Don’t worry that your audio will sound ‘flat’…as we age the high frequencies are the first things that we loose. Most people can’t hear up that high anyway. Only younger people and dogs.

Ramsey transmitters do seem to be susceptible to static discharge…so ground yourself before touching.

- Dave