Our 12 year old Ford has a factory fit FM/AM/CD audio system made by Sony. So in an effort to bring it up to date, I was contemplating changing the head unit to one that supported DAB/DAB+. However I was filled with trepidation around changing the roof-mounted aerial for one that had a dedicated DAB cable, in addition to the FM/AM cable. This would mean removing the headlining inside the car, the A-pillar surrounds, and probably lots of poking around behind the dashboard to run a couple of new aerial cables.
Instead I decided to try a different approach, and bought a Kinetic DAA-7001 splitter. This takes in the feed from the existing roof-mounted aerial, amplifies the signal, and splits out the FM/AM component into a male DIN connector, and the DAB component into a female SMB connector. The splitter is powered from the vehicle's switched power feed (red cable into the back of the ISO 10487 connector at the back of the head unit).
The roof-mounted aerial needs a wide frequency response, as it is trying to pick up both long wave (0.15MHz to 0.28MHz) and medium wave (0.52MHz to 1.6MHz) AM signals, FM signals (88MHz to 108MHz), and DAB signals (174MHz to 237MHz). Before fitting the splitter the two concerns I had were that the aerial wouldn't have a wide enough frequency response to pick up DAB signals, and that the splitter would be amplifying the signal at the end of the cable run, rather than at the aerial. Between these two concerns I wasn't expecting to get great reception, but the potential savings of not having to fit a DAB aerial made the £20 cost of the splitter a worthwhile experiment.
However despite my concerns, the splitter was an easy fit and after giving the head unit a minute to autotune into the available ensembles the car now has a working DAB radio. Admittedly this is only based on the car sat in the driveway, so we'll see how it fares out and about on journeys in the near future.
Instead I decided to try a different approach, and bought a Kinetic DAA-7001 splitter. This takes in the feed from the existing roof-mounted aerial, amplifies the signal, and splits out the FM/AM component into a male DIN connector, and the DAB component into a female SMB connector. The splitter is powered from the vehicle's switched power feed (red cable into the back of the ISO 10487 connector at the back of the head unit).
The roof-mounted aerial needs a wide frequency response, as it is trying to pick up both long wave (0.15MHz to 0.28MHz) and medium wave (0.52MHz to 1.6MHz) AM signals, FM signals (88MHz to 108MHz), and DAB signals (174MHz to 237MHz). Before fitting the splitter the two concerns I had were that the aerial wouldn't have a wide enough frequency response to pick up DAB signals, and that the splitter would be amplifying the signal at the end of the cable run, rather than at the aerial. Between these two concerns I wasn't expecting to get great reception, but the potential savings of not having to fit a DAB aerial made the £20 cost of the splitter a worthwhile experiment.
However despite my concerns, the splitter was an easy fit and after giving the head unit a minute to autotune into the available ensembles the car now has a working DAB radio. Admittedly this is only based on the car sat in the driveway, so we'll see how it fares out and about on journeys in the near future.
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