The trips from Austin to Dallas are fairly long and I like to listen to music. I have a CD player in my car but there are only so many times you can listen to the same music and only so many CDs I want to take the time to burn. I also got a Zune recently and wanted to use it in my car, sadly with no tape deck or audio in my options are limited.

I got the Zune official FM transmitter, it worked decent but I had to change the frequency too often and that got old quick. I did some more research, the overall description of FM transmitters is that they are horrible audio quality and a last resort option. I found some people modifying their transmitter to increase the strength and improve the quality. I went to the store and purchased an FM transmitter for $30 that is also an inverter.

On the trip to Dallas for holiday I used it and it worked better than the previous one but not good enough. Being only $30 I decide to mod the antenna and hopefully it will work better. I opened up the box and the inside of the transmitter/inverter was very clean. The antenna was extremely easy to find, the whole package was built as if they wanted people to mod it.

I quickly removed the old six inch antenna wire and replaced it with a new longer two foot wire three times as thick as the old wire. After I put everything back together and checked it out in the car.

These transmitters work better on frequencies that have static and are not being broadcast on. The better the signal the less static I would hear at higher volumes. For my first test I used the same frequency I used in Dallas, did not connect the mp3 player and increased the volume until I heard static. At about “30″ I heard a slight amount of static; going to “40″ I heard the same amount of static. Previously there was slight amount of static at “20″ and “30″ was around the max or I could hear noticeable amount of static while music was playing.

I was satisfied with this and I wanted to see how it would perform over a radio station broadcasting. I changed the frequency to a clear broadcast and then tried to transmit over it, it was successful but there was a fair amount of static and would not be usable. Overall, the easy 15 minute mod was worth it.