PURE Highway In-Car DAB

I live in Australia, and I have a PURE HIGHWAY DAB+ installed in my Golf, and because I bought it to listen to the ABC's DIG station, I have the unit stored in my glovebox out of sight and I don't have to touch it, thus I have all wires pretty much hidden. I live in the Geelong region (60km southwest of Melbourne) and have to rely on the Melbourne transmissions. With the supplied internal aerial reception is sporadic - useless really. So I purchased the external aerial that is available for it. What a difference! The only place I get drop outs is where my mobile phone also loses signal. I have read on forums/reviews of poor reception and the external aerial is mandatory I think.

I own a BMW, and whatever other things this car might do well, receiving AM broadcasts is not one of them.

This is a pity, because I spend most of my time listening to Radio 5. (I haven't added the word "live" because a lot of the stuff which is broadcast is recorded so I won't propagate an untruth.)

Anyway, the concept of the Pure Highway radio intrigued me. For those not familiar with it it is a DAB radio which will rebroadcast the signal on the FM waveband so that it may be heard.

There are plenty of reviews about it, and they vary between "wonderful" and "rubbish", so this review is purely my opinion. I cannot guarantee that my findings will apply in other cars or other locations.

The Highway is fairly simple, if untidy to install. There is a windscreen mount which clings to the radio magnetically, a power supply lead (with an overbright LCD) and a rather ingenious aerial. The secret of success is to get the aerial in the right place. It is self adhesive but only once, so I tried it in various positions on the inside of the windscreen using Sellotape. When finally satisfied I used the permanent adhesive.

On first use the radio autotunes and, just as importsntly, seeks out any unused parts of the FM spectrum. These will vary from area to area but as far as I know 87.6 MHz isn't used anywhere so I went for that. If your car radio has DBS the words "PURE DAB" will appear on the display.

I have found the performance remarkably good. A journey from Portsmouth to Chichester resulted in no more that a couple of seconds dropout throughout the whole trip, while a journey from Portsmouth to Bristol resulted in no dropouts but I did experience co-channel interference on the FM channel around M4 Junction 18. I wasn't actually using 87.6 at the time. If you think this is going to be a constant problem you can connect a permanent lead from the Pure to your radio if you have the facility. I have tried this and it is fine except that you have yet another wire on display.

So for me it works fine. There are also one or two fringe benefits. This set can be used away from the car on batteries with headphones with reasonably good performance, and there is also the facility to pause live radio for up to 15 minutes.

I bought it on Ebay for 40 odd pounds and I like it. You may not be so lucky so if you can try one out first I would recommend this approach.