Trevor Morris

The Griffin iTrip Mini is the first accessory that I’ve purchased for my Apple iPod Mini. It is an FM transmitter which allows you to broadcast your iPod Mini songs over the airwaves to any FM radio or receiver. The main reason I’ve got this little device, and I can tell you I was surprised how small it was, was for listening to my iPod wirelessly when on the road (driving of course, not walking down the middle).

The transmitter isn’t extremely powerful and that’s the way it needs to be. It just about reaches downstairs in our house which is great as it’ll work for my second application idea — House parties. Simply set the iPod in some room around the house, hidden away from the drunken misbehaviour and then set all the stereos to the appropriate FM frequency. Bam, synced music around the whole house!

The way the iTrip integrates into your iTunes is pretty smart. Basically it just creates a play list with hundreds of five second songs. These are used to tell the iTrip which station/frequency to broadcast on. Simply choose a station which is full of static (ie, not in use), play the song until the iTrip’s little light flashes and it’ll broadcast on that station.

The play list has “songs” named 87.0 all the way to something like 106.0 with all the 0.1s in-between. Stupidly I transferred all of these tracks. In theory, and hindsight, you could just transfer some empty station ranges. As the iTrip is pretty precise it’s best to use a digital receiver to pick up the signal, else you’ll going to have to have extremely careful fingers to tune it in manually.

The reason you choose an empty station is that the iTrips signal strength is pretty weak and you’ll just get mixed signals with existing radio broadcasts. The other reason is legal… coming on to that next! Due to anti-pirate issues within the UK, FM broadcasting in banned to stop so-called “Pirate Radio”. However, I believe there shouldn’t be any problem with this tiny transmitter because no one is going to be picking it up, especially if you’re tuned into an empty station. Also, as many people are turning to digital audio broadcasting I think this “problem” will soon fade out.

So far I’m impressed with the little device; however, I haven’t used it extensively yet. Griffin has done a nice job in porting the device to the smaller iPod Mini. It fits nicely and is styled to look like a simply extension. The packaging is up with that on the Apple iPod Mini, it’s clean and well made. The only problem is that it can only come in one colour, white, and therefore not match any of iPod Mini colours.

The online store where I purchased my iTrip was cheap and quick to deliver. But they packaged letters removing all blame to the use of FM transmitters… even the Griffen iTrip Mini packaging was full of warning stickers. Check them out…