FM Transmitter

What is a FM Transmitter?  It is a device that takes your audio and transmits it onto a radio.   There are several types of transmitters on the market.  You can spend as little as $15 or over $400.  It all depends on what you want to do with it.  I went the cheap route and bought the $15 one.  It is a Belkin Tunecast II which can be found at most box stores(Walmart, Kmart, etc.).  These are designed to use with IPods and MP3 players in your car.  They only transmit 10 to 20 feet.  

For the purpose of using the Belkin in a Christmas display, it must be modified.  It is rather simple to do.   The whole idea is to get the transmitter to reach to the road so viewers can listen to the music.  Of course by law, you can not go past 200' or you need a license.   

First you want to take it apart to get at the curcuit board.  Once there you will see some wires.  You want to remove the blue wire which is the antenna.  To do this, desolder the wire and remove.  You will then want to solder a new wire using 20 AWG wire.  The reason for the new wire is to make it longer.  You need to use a calculator to figure out what length you need according to what radio station you will be using.   Click here for the calculator.

Controllers

People always ask how the display works.  The heart of the display is the controllers.  The controllers are basically circuit boards built to direct electrical current to different circuits.  This is controlled by computer.  Basically I program the software program to tell it what to do according to the song being played.  The computer then tells the controller what to do.  Each controller has 16 channels and for 2010, there will be 5 controllers equalling 80 channels.  This means there can be up to 80 different things going on at one time.  Or 80 different circuits controlling 80 different groups of lights.  The longest part of setting it up is sequencing the music to the lights.  It takes about  1 hour to sequence 1 minute of song on 16 channels.  So a 3 minute song with 80 channels takes roughly 15 hours!  The 2010 display should have 8 songs that average 3 minutes.  So it should take about 120 hours to sequence this years show.  As you can see, this is a time consuming hobby but it is fun! 

The controllers are designed and made by Light-O-Rama. www.lightorama.com

These controllers can be purchased already built or you can buy the parts and solder everything yourself, which is what I do to save some money.