A radio transmitter for iPhone from 2008 or 2009
A few days ago, in a bag hidden on a shelf far back in the garage, I came across a small part that looked like this:
I bought it in 2008 or 2009. It was by Griffin and called iTrip. It was a small VHF radio transmitter that plugged into the iPhone.
At the time, I still lived far from work and had to drive about 80 km there and back every day. And instead of burning pounds of music and audio books onto CDs to listen to while driving, I downloaded them to my smartphone. There was no external connection in my car to which I could have connected the audio output for headphones with a cable. So I bought this little addition. However, it was a fiddly thing that had a very weak transmit power. It was powered by the smartphone battery. It had a knob that you could use to set a random frequency. Then you looked for them on the radio with the station search or by hand. But if the random frequency was too close to a frequency on which a radio station was broadcasting, there was interference. So you had to try a number of frequencies until it worked. It didn’t work that well over long distances. I still remember that I once drove from Luxembourg to Cologne and suddenly the FM gaps in Luxembourg were occupied by radio stations in Germany, which led to interference again.
I used the transmitter for a long time, even when the iPhone changed the connection because there was an adapter. Then when I got a new car that had a USB port on the radio, it became superfluous because I could then listen to everything on the USB stick.
By the way, I just connected it to my smartphone. It still works!
(Joel from joel.lu)