The original concept for a radio in a car is not a new one. The issue of accompanying it with a car pc was!
I tried a number of different radios in the quest for the holy grail: Silabs, HQCT, Dlink - basically everything. Reception was never as good as the original car headunit and in some cases totally unlistenable.
Then in mid 2009 a chap on the digital-car forums wrote a program to talk to a Venice 5 DAB module. I built this circuit on veroboard and tried it out in my car. Reception was okay on 2 out of 5 available streams and I saw some potential in this. This is the original circuit that Chris31 provided:
The above circuit and its literature are still available on the digital-car website. Note: it will not work on USB without some mods!
A few blown radios later and quite a lot of work by a number of people and I came up with this.
The venice module is very sensitive to any small spikes in power, when it is plugged on a USB rail, any other devices its paralleled with on the same regulator can cause slight deviations in current draw. This causes the radio to behave erratically. The other problem is switch mode power supplys - especially M2-ATX, M3-ATX, M4-ATX. This is the main reason for the large power capacitors, I didn't have the time or money to be able to buy every power supply going around so I did a belt and braces job.
I no longer manufacture any boards, I still have a few kicking around which I use as test beds but there is a unit manufactured by Craig Brass that is based on the Venice 7 (supports DAB+) you can purchase here
