Well, I suppose it had to happen… with all of the talk about reasonably priced Talking House transmitters on eBay, I could not resist… a Talking House is now on the way! Incidentally, I received a “push” when I discovered a new Talking House station operated by one of the local real estate agents on my lake. I checked the range, and it doesn’t do too badly, although the audio is atrocious and is accompanied by copious amounts of hum and noise… that should be very fixable, I think.
The thing I find most intriguing about the TH is the automatic antenna tuning feature. That’s got to be one of the coolest things around! Needless to say, in order for a real estate agent to set it up, they needed a feature like that. I plan on using mine indoors with a 3M wire antenna.
Of course, I’ll take care to keep it away from glass. Radio waves are scared of glass, you know! :o)
Update: drove by the home again tonight, and considering that it is an indoor installation, I am very impressed with the range. I struggle to do that well with my SSTRAN on an indoor antenna, at a much higher frequency on the dial. Also; this one does not seem to have the frequency warble I’ve noticed on others, and it seems to be close to frequency. So they must have improved them significantly. I am not sure why there is so much hum… maybe it was recorded that way, or maybe they are lacking a good ground. But I would tend to think it was recorded that way, since the range is pretty decent.
radio8z says
Talking House….Plug and Play?
WEAK,
I know from your many past posts that you are technically astute and your report on experience with the Talking House you acquired is most interesting. The TH appears to be a turn key device which enables the “appliance operator” to get on the air without a great deal of technical knowledge.
The more the merrier. After all, the Windows operating systems brought computer use to the masses by developing an icon based graphical user interface to the operating system (DOS) and the rest is history.
Thanks for your report and we look foward to hearing of your future adventures with this unit.
Neil