Review

Review - The Find Unused FM Frequencies in Your Area Web page

Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 11:55 AM - by

If you have an FM transmitter for your iPod, allow me to introduce you to a Web service that helps you find the best unused FM radio frequency in your area quickly and easily.

It's the Find Unused FM Frequencies in Your Area Web page offered by radio-locator.com. It's fast, it's easy, and best of all, it's free. Just type your zip code or city and state and click the Go button. In seconds you'll be offered a list of the best vacant channels, the next best channels, and some other channels that may work decently as shown here:

If you've ever wasted time looking for the best FM station for your transmitter(s), give it a try. It worked great for my area (Austin, TX) but your mileage may vary.

Here's a tip: I recently drove from Austin to Houston and back (I took my 15-year old to the DUB Car Show & Rap Concert). I looked up the best stations for the major cities and towns on the way -- Elgin, Giddings, Brenham, Tomball, and Houston -- before I left home, printed them, and took them in the car with me. And we had fabulous iPod-to-FM radio reception all the way to Houston and back. So if you're planning a road trip, look up some cities on your route and enjoy high-quality tunes the whole way.

One last thing: I would never have discovered this site if I hadn't received a press release from Belkin directing me to their My Best FM page. While messing around on Belkin's page I noticed that it said, "radio frequency data provided by Radio-Locator.com," so I checked out that site and found that while both sites reported the best channels in the three column format you see above, only Radio-Locator.com included the cool graph of predicted signal strength. They're both free and both supply the same info, so if you don't care about cool graphs, you can use either one.

The Bottom Line

If you have an FM transmitter for your iPod and want to find the best FM stations to use with it, the Find Unused FM Frequencies in Your Area Web page at radio-locator.com does the trick quickly, easily, and for free. How could you not love that?

Just The Facts

Pros: Makes finding the best FM station for your transmitter device(s) fast and easy.

Cons: none

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DaiMac said:

member since 29 Jun 2001 with 952 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Mon Sep 10, 2007 3:01 pm

Cool site, though I've already put in the time to figure out the right frequency in my area, this could be _really_ handy for road trips. They need to have an iPod Touch/iPhone-tailored version of the site as well, as that would be the most likely tool to use this on the road. Barring that, I guess next time I take a long trip I'll be running the zip codes I pass through by this site before I go.

Thanks for the tip Bob!

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DoctorMac said:

member since 16 Oct 2006 with 32 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Mon Sep 10, 2007 3:41 pm

Quote
DaiMac wrote:
...I guess next time I take a long trip I'll be running the zip codes I pass through by this site before I go.

You don't even need the zip codes. Just type the city and state and click Go.

Regards,

Bob "Dr. Mac" LeVitus -- Raconteur, wordsmith, consultant, author of 50+ books, and author of this review

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doneck said:

member since 10 Sep 2007 with 1 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Mon Sep 10, 2007 11:23 pm

This kind of information has been been readily available for years from the FCC's "FMQ FM Radio Database Query" at <http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/fmq.html>.

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gslusher said:

member since 13 Nov 2002 with 2001 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Sep 11, 2007 2:02 am

Quote
doneck wrote:
This kind of information has been been readily available for years from the FCC's "FMQ FM Radio Database Query" at <http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/fmq.html>.

From the Radio-Locator "about" page:

"The bulk of the information for U.S. and Canadian radio stations on Radio-Locator comes from the FCC's public engineering databases. We make corrections to this data when necessary, and we add other information, such as website addresses, audio streams, coverage maps, addresses and phone numbers."

If you want to spend a long time searching and like doing things the hard way, by all means use the FCC site. If you put in a city, the only stations that are returned are those with that city as an address: a neighboring city will not be returned. You can do a radius search, but you have to use the latitude and longitude. So, your choices are: spend a few hours figuring out the FCC database or a few seconds with the Radio-Locator site.

Radio-Locator is the decendant of a site started in *1994*, so it, too, "has been readily available for years." (There weren't many people using the Internet in 1994.) In fact, I expect that it's been online LONGER than the FCC's database has been.

The real point, though, is why would you refer people a site that's harder to use and has less information, when radio-locator.com is FREE? It would be one thing if they charged, but they don't.

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