Why bother with AUX input or even FM transmitter? More and more car audio systems have AD2P support. e.g. the Sony MEX-BT* series. Blaupunkt and Pioneer are also manuacturing AD2P enabled car audio systems.

After using FM transitters for years (and I was never really happy with the sound quality of any of these FM tramitters) I recently bought a Sony car audio with AD2P support. The quality via AD2P is so much better than via FM transmitter.

And as I understand, the N900 will support AD2P out of the box.

So far the N900's FM transmitter (stereo, btw) has worked great for me. It's got the eae of use of a Belkin and the quality of an iTrip. Very good experiences so far.

Tim

Yes, and it sounds awesome with my Motorola S9s.

Tim

- rental cars
- company cars
- old cars
etc ....

Your (new) girlfriends car....

Also, you can blast tunes anywhere a radio can be found, even transmit and share music in creative cases.

Maybe I missed this: does the N900 have an FM receiver as well?

};^)~

Yes it has a receiver as well. Just no app that uses it yet.

I hope someone makes an app that takes audio from the mic and pumps it out through the FM transmitter. It will turn the N900 into a wireless microphone.

Can't speak to whether the N900 supports this frequency, but I figured I'd put my radio nerd hat on for a minute. There are two reasons why there are basically no licensed radio stations at 87.9 FM:

1) The treaties the US has with Canada and Mexico only cover the frequencies from 88.1 MHz through 107.9 MHz. The FCC has the actual documents at http://www.fcc.gov/ib/sand/agree/fil...-bc/can-fm.pdf and http://www.fcc.gov/ib/sand/agree/files/mex-bc/fmbc.pdf. Any station within 320 km of either border has to abide by these agreements and can't be on 87.9, so that rules out large swathes of the northern and southern portions of the US.

2) The other reason has to do with the old analog VHF TV channel 6. The audio for channel 6 was broadcast at 87.75 MHz using the exact same transmission technique as broadcast radio. Since each FM station needs 0.1 MHz of space on each side of its center frequency, channel 6 (which would extend to 87.85 MHz upwards) rules out a radio station at 87.9 (which would extend to 87.8 MHz downwards). So anywhere there was a channel 6 TV station, 87.9 MHz couldn't be allocated.

Interesting tidbit: Wikipedia claims (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broa..._United_States) that there are in fact only *two* licensed radio stations in the whole country on 87.9MHz: KSFH Mountain View, CA (a high school station) and K200AA Sun Valley, NV (a translator of Christian radio station KAWZ Twin Falls, ID).

And there's your bit of radio trivia for the day (or month!). Now back to our regularly scheduled programming, also known as "wishing I could buy an N900"...

That's the best idea I've heard all day!

@colbalt917

Thank you for the extremely thorough explanation of 87.9 MHz.

So, I think you would agree that the N900 having the ability to broadcast on this frequency would be fantastic. Well, at least for Americans.

Seriously! It's a great idea! I wonder how far it transmits.

It would be fun to have this via wifi as well. Which raises an interesting question...

Are there any 'discovery' servers available for maemo? For example, discovering a device on a local network and potentially the services that it's open to. This would be a useful little project.

}:^)~