jtnt://life/unedited

The story of a boy, rush hour traffic, and his new iTrip.

After 5 months of delay, Brown delivered my 2nd generation iTrip today. I'm still not sure of exactly what problems Griffin Technology had in getting these out on time for the initially-announced mid-July ship date.

My first trial with what has to be a nominee for the cutest accessory for the iPod, if there were such an award, was at work. I looked for an open station via the freeware iTrip Station Finder software kindly offered by Griffin, and headed into my boss' office, where the only digital-tuning radio in the office lives. It worked, but the audio was filled with static.

With disillusionment and low expectations, I, still excited, headed to my car to try the iTrip out on my way to a holiday party to which I was following a co-worker. This will come into play later.

While stuck in traffic, I got my first opportunity to scan for an open radio frequency. This, I have found, is the only way to find a reliable station. The aforementioned iTrip Station Finder is a joke. After a few times around the dial, surfing the alarmingly busy Washington, D.C. airwaves, I settled on 101.7. There were virtually no frequencies that weren't picking up some noise from their neighbors.

I set the iTrip to broadcast over 101.7 via the somewhat clunky method devised by the Griffin engineers. The process involves choosing the frequency from an "iTrip Stations" playlist, playing a song of blips, bleeps, and whirs, pressing Play/Pause again, and waiting a few seconds for the iTrip to sort everything out.

This drawn out process becomes somewhat dangerous if it has to be performed on the road, which is where I use my iPod 80 percent of the time.

More annoying is that to test the station you have chosen, you must back out of this playlist, find a real song to play, and see how it sounds. If the frequency isn't clean enough, your iTrip sounds like it's playing via a radio station in another state, and you start the process all over. If you are in the middle of a song, and a previously clean frequency starts to go bad, you must stop the song and submit yourself to the laborious tuning process, then go back and find the song to which you were listening. Not money, as my co-workers would say.

Returning to our story...

As annoying as all that is, 101.7, after an initial couple of hiccups, turned out to work very well throughout my evening's travels from Virginia, to Maryland, and into DC. There were occassional bits of static, but overall the sound was acceptable, and I quickly got used to the fairly rare occurrences of interference.

Still excited about the quality of my now-wireless audio solution, I wrang my co-worker in the car also stuck in traffic ahead of me (I told you he'd come up again.), and told him to tune his radio to 101.7.

"Oh, man! That is so cool!," wrang through the cell phone. His radio was now playing, with listenable clarity, the song my iPod/iTrip was broadcasting!

We tested the signal by moving farther apart, and to no surprise the quality went down. A big SUV got between us at one point, and even though my co-worker reported that he would still get the broadcast on and off as it bounced around the cars, the audio still came through. I wonder if the wall-to-wall traffic helped the signal or hurt the reception he was getting?

Basically, as long as we were in sight of each other, no more than 20 feet apart, he could hear my tunes. We immediately realized the multiple-car roadtrip possibilities of this, especially if combined with those ubiquitous walkie-talkies.

The true test of the usefulness of the iTrip and it's process of finding a clear channel will come on my first long trip, where I will travel in and out of various radio markets. We'll see how setting everything up on-the-fly goes.

The iTrip didn't fully live up to my expectations of perfect FM signal sound, but I've only had it for a few hours, and I'm holding out hope. Until then, my new favorite radio station is definitely 101.7 WJTNT.