Home-made DAB radio in-car installation

I thought you might be interested to see my recent home-made in-car DAB radio. I have an Empeg mp3 player in my car dash which doesn’t have a radio feature. I need to listen to FM radio for local traffic reports and also need to listen to DAB because 6 Music is my station of choice! Revo sell an in-car unit but it’s £200 and is DAB only. Sainsbury’s sell a portable which has excellent reception and accepts a 12 volt power input. At a snip under £50 I felt this would be perfect for my car especially seeing as it has both FM and DAB reception.

So I took it to bits and took a saw to it!

I cut the case apart and binned the speakers. Then I made an aluminium box suitable for housing it in my car’s glove box

I wired the aerial to my car’s aerial connection and took power from my mp3 player’s feed wire for switching on the amp so effectively the mp3 player turns on the radio. Sound comes from the headphone output and into my mp3 player's AUX phono inputs

Next I installed it in my car’s centre glove box

It all works perfectly and has excellent reception and fairly good sound quality

Fergus McIver

ferg at monkeyrun dot co dot uk