Advantages: Excellent radio both at FM & AM Disadvantages: Tape player (No CD)
this blaupunkt car radio has an excellent radio front end at both FM & (mostly) AM! Its ability to receive AM (MW) radio broadcasts with the usual very short FM whip antennas that are commonly found at newer cars, is a real plus! And the sound on AM isn't bad at all. It does have a good AM IF bandwidth filter probably, that allow you to listen good sounded AM stations, with a quality (at least an AM quality that most newer radios doesn't provide for the forgotten ? MW band), while keeping the selectivity needed for first adjacent channel intereference out. A better noise blanker filter, or a faster AGC wil help a little at city terrains where the manmade static noises are higher!
For FM the sound is good (take in account the overcompressed FM modulated signals that most stations have now) and its sensitivity is good enough to get ...
Advantages: An idea if you really don't know the area. Disadvantages: Limited, outdated mapping, not so easy to use
In our brand new Fiesta, delivered this month, the Blaupunkt TravelPilot comes fitted in a unit combined with the radio.
To try this system out, over a period of three weeks, and a total of about 600 miles, entirely within my home county of West Yorkshire, i ran the TravelPilot alongside my own local knowledge of the area built up over 17 years of driving around the area.
To enter a destination it is necessary to go through a menu and a series of entries not wholly unlike entering a text message on a mobile phone. There is a form of predictive texting, which can be quite useful.
The problem I found, though, was that before I could find the way to, say, Huddersfield Police Station I needed to know what road it is in. There seems to be no provision for places like hospitals or police stations as destinations.
Back to the Ato ...
