A while back during a meeting of the ALPB i mentioned the Whole House 2.0 Fm transmitter has a few flaws, that is besides being over powered while it's supposed to be certified.
Tim in Bovey tested the Whole House 3.0 in an open field with a Potomac and another Fim showing the 3.0 was over powered by as much as 382 uV/m to 17775 uV/m, the video I shot this afternoon confirms this transmitter could get an average user into some trouble.
The day i discovered that the transmitter displayed 136.500 mhz i had enough sense to save that channel in one of the presets, the scanner i used to show the WH was transmitting out of band was set to what is called Close Call mode.
Close Call mode receives only signals that are in your neighborhood or are strong enough to break the squelch and offers the user the option to add a new frequency to their memory bank. The WH was all over the UHF band with spurious signals, starting at 462.662 mhz and ending at 462.687 mhz.
After the video was shot, i punched in 136.500 Mhz and the signal was not present there, that frequency would be in the aircraft band if i am not mistaken. Why the heck does this chip even allow access to those frequencies in the first place?
I attempted to tune above and below the displayed channel 136.5 mhz and was able to go lower into the aircraft band but the transmitter was still locking into the UHF band, nothing was heard on the Bearcat scanner and to be absolutely sure i scanned the aircraft band on a Grundig G3, still nothing there.
So it seems the transmitter displays aircraft band frequencies but transmits in the UHF GMRS and Business bands, what about Police and Fire bands?
I see this little transmitter causing users some problems with the FCC.
Also it is important to note that the WH 2.0 was not on the higher power setting even though I have located the power switch in the battery compartment, it was not turned up.
Needless to say, i no longer use this transmitter, view the video below on YouTube.
Whole House 2.0 Fm Transmitter trouble
Thanks
P.S. yes my work bench is a mess, sure, i might clean it up later. Might.
Barry of BBR Yardwide
now that is one serious issue with the whole house FM transmitter 2.0. I knew that there was issues with it because other people mention that it was a mess on a spectrum analyzer. I also noticed some issues with the 3.0 causing more bleed over then an experiment we did legally licensed experiment at that with a higher power transmitter and you'd be surprised how much cleaner that one was. This one was done via a member of the new radio Revolution who has the experimental license.
it scares me how much people complain about Chinese transmitter but yet sometimes they're actually cleaner than the ones that the FCC is certifying to be one-hundred-percent part 15 compliant. That just shows you that the FCC really doesn't do much work at all. maybe we need a hobby broadcast engineer to do the job that government officials cannot do it and that is to clean up the Spectrum in the FM band as well as helping those fine clean transmitter and making those legal.
I don't believe that the FCC tests these things themselves. They only inspect test reports from test labs. If the test lab says that it's OK, then the product gets certified.
Either the test lab is not doing their job for some of these transmitters, or the manufacturer is submitting specially tweaked transmitters to the test lab, and producing something else entirely different on the assembly lines.
The FCC Really needs to start inspecting transmitter manufacturers to be sure they are making transmitters that are clean. A surprise visit and measurements with a spectrum analyzer could determine rather or not there are spurs being generated from these transmitters.
Until then trusting a 3rd party lab is not the best way as you never know who is fudging the tests to get this crap on the market that is not clean at all.
Loose it! Wonder how it started displaying 1635mhz on the display but another frequency on the scanner?
It's definitely gone haywire....ya that could get you in some hot water.
But when tested...even if every one was tested you can't prevent some defects and a malfunction. That is up to the user to know if it's working like it should.
It wasn't always doing this so you can't blame the certification.
Mark
Several years back the issue of FCC certification for the WH transmitter came up here: http://www.part15.us/forum/part15-forums/general-discussion/whole-house-fm-transmitter-0
Start reading at post #7. It turned out that despite their misleading ad claims leading one to believe it was certified, in fact it was not. You might enjoy the go-around between me and the WH representative.
Neil
The original Whole House wasn't certified. The latest one (Whole House 3) is.
ArtisanRadio said "The original Whole House wasn't certified. The latest one (Whole House 3) is."
Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. Lately these Chinese markets have been using certification stickers on other merchansie that was not actually tested in an FCC approved lab.
Which i suppose is the main reason i haven't really made the move to a certified fm or am transmitter, it's hard to tell which product is truly certified or certifiable lol.
Although i suppose it wouldn't hurt anything if i made sure everything was 100% certified.
I have been considering the C.Crane Digital FM transmitter. Price is right..