This radio gets a poor reception
Wavefinder Windows 98/Me/2000 £299 Radioscape/Psion **
If you want to listen to digital radio on your PC, Psion's new Wavefinder makes that possible. And because the signal is digital, it is very easy to capture audio files by saving them as either MP2 or MP3 files. However, it comes at a high price, when you consider that the basic digital radio is now available free, via a Sky Digital or better set-top box. The main drawback with those, of course, is that they deliver television signals as well.
Digital radio, or DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting), seems to have been introduced because it was possible, not because anyone needed it. FM radio works well enough in most areas: if it didn't, people would buy better radio tuners and complain about the stations that pump out mediocre FM signals. But digital radio provided a way to exploit some of the spectrum formerly used for 405-line TV transmissions, if listeners could be persuaded to buy new digital radios.
So far, they have not been persuaded. Following the launch in 1995, manufacturers have failed to introduce cheap products and the public has stayed away in droves. Although the Wavefinder may be "inexpensive" at £300, as Psion claims, it is still three times the price of a basic hi-fi tuner and 10 times what the average pop fan wants to pay.
It is, however, a remarkable piece of British technology. The Wavefinder is basically a 68cm radio aerial with a hand-sized bulge in the middle, and the bulge contains all the electronics required. There is no need for a big box or a PC expansion card: you just plug it straight into a PC's USB port. It does require its own mains supply, which is a minor drawback, but there is only one wire to the aerial.
Like Apple's iMac, the Wavefinder comes straight out of the Jetsons school of pretentious plastics engineering, and pulses with coloured lights when in use. But it is unlikely to harmonise with many of your furnishings, unless you own a Lava lamp, and there is no software for Mac OS.
The Wavefinder is easy to install using the CD software supplied, which searches for available stations and displays them as icons on a pop-up screen. When you select a station, it takes up to about 10 seconds to tune in. To make a recording, you have only to click a button and type in a file name.
There is, unfortunately, one serious drawback: the software does not include a timer, so you can't set it to "tape" a program while you are out. Much cheaper analogue PC radios, such as the D-Link, provide this function.
The audio quality is very impressive compared with internet radio, and does not break up due to congestion (traffic on the net). In fact, it sounded better than I expected, considering that digital radio uses a psychoacoustic "perceptual coding" system to reduce the amount of data transmitted. (Briefly, the system assumes you can't hear sounds that are masked by other sounds at the same frequency.)
However, one of the reasons people listen to radio stations on the net is because they can hear things that are not available any other way. The Wavefinder produced only 40 stations (this will vary by area), including the national BBC stations, Capital Radio, Jazz FM, Kiss FM, and TalkRadio. There are some different stations such as the Ministry of Sound, but it is not an exciting selection. Most of it is pap.
The digital advantage is that you could get read-outs of the tracks being played and other information. There has even been talk of transmitting pictures, web pages or games using digital radio, but the reality is only a shadow of the hype.
Digital radio stations are transmitted together in packages (called "ensembles" in the trade), so the maximum bandwidth of 2.3Mbits/sec may be shared by eight to 12 broadcasters. (My 40 stations, for example, came from four ensembles; there could be up to seven.) Individual stations may therefore be using as little as 64-128kbits/sec, which is barely hi-fi, and legally they are only allowed to use a small proportion of their band width for other data. It is technically possible to use DAB to carry information from the internet, in one direction, for free, but it does not make much sense.
It would be great to receive internet radio stations at the sort of audio quality the Wavefinder provides, but unlike 3Com's Kerbango, Psion's device cannot tune in to internet radio stations. It would be useful if the Wavefinder could be set up to record songs while you were out, preferably by name, and save them as MP3 files... but it can't, so you might as well download MP3s from the net. And it would be an entertaining toy at under £100, or even less, especially if built into something mobile. But at the price, it is much less fun than an Arcam Alpha and a decent aerial.
