partial "solution" that really works for the skipping, popping, crackling

[Pinny]

While I love the sa6's the w-1 was driving me a bit batty. I was actually going to put it up for sale on the buy/sell forums, but I tried one last ditch effort and it worked really well.

I got the idea from the fm transmitter in my car. It was skipping terribly and I read somewhere online to try attaching a headphone extension cable between the device and my mp3 player. I'm not exactly sure why, but it helped alot. My 2 guesses are that 1. it effectively increased the antenna size tremendously, and 2. the wire I used was (I believe) shielded which may have reduced interference. Anyway it helped alot and so I decided to try the same thing with the w-1 transmitter.

At first I grabbed a super junky extension cable I had lying around. It only made a tiny difference, not worth bothering. When you touched the end of the cable, or the w-1 transmitter, you would hear popping and crackling. I tried after that a nice high quality cable that came with a gigabyte car-charger I bought a while back. What a world of a difference it made! When touching the end of the cable or the transmitter, dead silence. The background hum is still present but absolutely zero popping or crackling EVEN WHILE my iphone 3g is streaming/transmitting data. Most of the time that is - I do get one or two crackles infrequently.

Now for skipping: I used to put it in my pocket and get as many as several skips per minute. Now I put it in my front pants pocket and I get at most 1 per minute when I'm walking around.

It's a partial solution because it doesn't totally eliminate crackling and skipping, but yet at the same time, it does make a tremendous difference. If your hooked on wireless, you should try this. Just make sure you get a good quality cable (in my experience you can tell a good quality cable just from looking at it). Radioshack should have em for a couple bucks and you can return it if it doesn't help.

Post your results if you try this too.

edit: looking around online, it seems the longer antenna is mainly what's helping. I'm using a 3 foot cable. For comparison I used a 10' cable which didn't seem to make any improvement, although it's a crappy cable, so that may be what's canceling out any improvement.