Oddware: Cadet PC Radio AM/FM tuner card with RDS
remember these things? FM radio tuner cards you could add to your PC it was common to see them advertised in the mid to late 1990s and some new computers at the time such as the Toshiba Infinia series came with an FM radio tuner built in in the era before streaming services and podcasts it made sense because FM radio was an easy and inexpensive way to listen to music news and entertainment but there was one particular tuner card which caught my interest: the Cadet PC Radio also known as the Cadet Data Radio which could not only receive the FM Radio Data System RDS but it also included an AM radio tuner I always wondered how well that would work because while many people did listen to FM radio on their desk next to their computer if you ever tried listening to AM radio nearby a computer all but the strongest signals are going to be swamped out by noise and interference generated by the computer itself well, now I finally get to find out because I own one. the box says the Cadet is a state-of-the-art AM/FM stereo receiver for your Windows PC now you can turn your computer into a complete stereo system the Cadet offers advanced features such as radio on demand and seek by program type that are unparalleled in the world of AM/FM receivers Cadet receives and displays RDS Radio Data System data a technology which provides many digital enhancements to analog FM radio and then there's a long list of features including state-of-the-art PLL synthesizer using fuzzy logic tuning algorithm. fuzzy logic was a buzzword used back in the '90s basically the same way that AI is being used today. "it uses a combination of analytical algorithms including neural nets and fuzzy logic but the focus is on massive data collection to build a library of every possible version of a handwritten character" it also includes 25 event Radio On Demand VCR-like programmed recording of radio programs and then it lists the various features of the Radio Data System which is actually known as RBDS here in North America which is a slightly different but mostly compatible version of the RDS system that was developed in Europe it recommends a 486DX-33 or better running Windows 95, 98, or Linux. it includes an FM dipole antenna and an AM shielded antenna -- I guess we'll find out how well shielded it actually is and it lists a copyright date of 1996 to 2000 and it says it was assembled in USA it's an 8-bit ISA plug and play card and it was designed to connect to your sound card's CD audio input and there they list the specifications of the AM tuner, FM tuner, and FM stereo decoder it was made by a company called ADS Technologies and in this ad from 1997 they listed an estimated street price of $69 I looked up the patent number listed on the box and it's a radio reception system for general purpose computer filed in 1995 by Michael S. McCoy and Michael E. Hayworth of MMGT Enterprises and I love this line drawing it has of a
desktop PC equipped with the radio tuner card and a very tiny pair of speakers now finally it's time to open it up and relieve it of this shrinkwrap which is continuing to shrink and slowly crushing the box like you often see with video games and computer games OK, I see some wires... the manual with the software CD. there's the FM antenna, here is... well, actually, wait a minute -- these both look like FM antennas. well, I guess I'll figure that later and here is that card and as expected it's just a little 8-bit ISA card and wow that manual looks like it was photocopied and it turns out this is the FM dipole antenna equipped with one of these 300 ohm to 75 ohm adapters and this is supposed to be the AM antenna even though it doesn't look shielded at all despite what they claimed this is what I expected them to include: an AM loop antenna the same kind you've seen included with many stereo systems and this one actually has a 3.5 mm plug on it already so I'll give this one a try and see how it works and the manual pretty much admits that the AM reception won't be very good saying it will never be as clear as FM reception and it's susceptible to all kinds of interference and they recommend upgrading it with an 80-foot longwire antenna that you could buy at Radio Shack for about $10 -- those were the days! and here's a closer look at the tuner card it has a coaxial FM antenna input a 3.5 mm AM antenna
input and a 3.5 mm stereo audio output which you could use with the cable that was provided to plug it into your sound card's line input jack or you could use these internal connectors to work as a pass-through: you would plug your CD-ROM audio drive output into this connector and then it would combine that with the audio from this card and feed it into your sound card's CD audio input the heart of it is the Philips TEA5757 self-tuned radio chip which includes the AM tuner, FM tuner, and FM stereo decoder all in one integrated circuit it has a copyright date of 1997 but this one was actually made in the fifth week of the year 2000 which is surprisingly late for one of these tuner cards; they had pretty much disappeared by then and I'm going to try using in this Compaq Deskpro EN Pentium III system which is in this neat little slimline small form factor case despite its diminutive size it still manages to include a 16-bit ISA slot shared with one of its two PCI slots this Compaq does have onboard audio but unfortunately it does not have a conventional CD-ROM audio header nor does it have a line input jack so I'm also going to add this Aureal Vortex 2 sound card which actually has multiple audio inputs so if I did have this configured with the CD drive I would not need to use that pass-through I could use one of these other inputs and connect it to the tuner card and there it is with both the tuner card and the sound card neatly installed in the case I could actually still use it with that external patch cable but I don't need to I had no luck at getting the Cadet radio card working in Windows XP because there are no Windows XP drivers for it so while the software did install... any attempt at running it would cause it to immediately crash so in order to get it to work I'll have to downgrade to Windows 95 or 98. I don't think this computer can even run
Windows 95 it's a little bit too new but I'll try Windows 98 and see if that works here I am in Windows 98 and this time the driver did install. it shows up as ADS Cadet FM Radio Data Receiver and it says this device is working properly so all should be well and good except when I try to run the Cadet Radio Lite software... the regular Cadet Radio is basically the same thing except for some reason it also includes a CD player so I'll just use the Lite version and after a few seconds for some reason it tuned itself to 89.9 which is a station in this area but it's not the strongest on the dial so I don't know why it picked that frequency but even though it says it's playing we're not hearing anything and I have the speakers turned up and connected directly to the output of the radio tuner card and also down here it actually says 0.0 MHz so
let me try to move that up to a station at 92.3 which is a pretty strong station and this control is rather fiddly... so there it is, 92.3 MHz. it says it's playing but we're not hearing anything and I definitely do have the antenna connected so FM is not working I'll change band and it still says 92.3 even though I'm trying to switch to AM yeah, let me try that full version because on that one at least it did try to work on AM so here's the full version. I'll choose AM... oh goody, we get an illegal operation and it will be shut down. let me try that again... OK, is FM at least working? nope! illegal operation and
that's not the only software it comes with: there is also a Remote Radio which just is designed to look like a remote control and again it looks like it's working but we're not hearing anything. there's also a Taskbar Radio which doesn't work and that's what it looks like if it would work so none of this software it came with for Windows seems to be working however if I restart the computer in MS-DOS mode I discovered in the diagnostics directory of the CD-ROM it came with there's actually some DOS software and that actually seems to work for example CONFCAD says configuration successful and QWKTST is some kind of quick test program and it's spitting out all this data and then there's this radio program which lets you choose a frequency so I'll do radio -FM and for some reason it's in kHz even on FM so 92.3 MHz is 92,300 kHz "this is 1010 WINS at 92.3 FM you give us 22 minutes we'll give you the world... good evening 32° at 6:40 I'm Lori Madden" so the radio is clearly working although that station is broadcasting in stereo even though it says station is mono I'll try another FM station, 88.9... and there's the Smooth Jazz station
93.9 is WNYC 101.1... let's see if it'll get the Classical station, 105.9... yes it is so it's picking up plenty
of stations on FM although for some reason it's reporting them all as mono so let's try AM you do radio and then -MW for medium wave 770 and it is picking up a talk station 710... another talk station that's ESPN Radio that's actually picking up WBZ from Boston via skywave because it's nighttime right now so with that little loop antenna I showed as long as you place it far enough away from the computer the reception is actually pretty good on AM but don't get your hopes up about it potentially supporting AM Stereo when you see it say "station is mono" even when it's tuned to AM because here it is tuned to my own transmitter which is transmitting in Motorola C-Quam AM Stereo and it still says "station is mono" and if you notice it mentions longwave and shortwave it does support those frequencies but the reception is obviously not going to be very good especially with all the interference the computer itself generates for example I set my transmitter to transmit a 1 kHz tone on 250 kHz longwave and if I tune that in and turn up the volume... through a lot noise and interference you can hear that 1 kHz tone and same thing with shortwave I'm now transmitting a 400 Hz tone on 2 MHz and if I tune it to 2000 kHz shortwave you can hear that tone "grab your coat and your scarf because it's freezing out there we're mostly clear but temperatures are dropping down to 15 tonight and for your Tuesday looking at mostly sunny skies with temperatures in the low 30s I'm Chris Vance with you at the Rock of New Jersey 105.5 WDHA back to the DHA Rock right now with Boston and Peace of Mind" "don't let your childhood fade away on old tapes don't let your parents' memory fade away it's time to digitize and future-proof those priceless moments fast forward into the digital era with LegacyBox visit legacybox.com/jessie today and unlock 50% off your order that's legacybox.com/jessie... tune in to the Papa Report with John Papa what is the purpose
of your retirement plan we want to find out is it to go travel is it to go see the grandkids tune in to the Papa report Sundays at 2 pm on 710 WOR the Voice of New York" I have good news I was able to get the tuner card working in Windows by going into the control panel and manually choosing an input/output range for it instead of letting it set it automatically there you can see it displaying some of the RDS data although it's rather slow and choppy in the way it updates that data so here you can see the RDS data it's displaying including the station's call letters this field is called the Program Service; it's eight characters. in the rest of the world it's supposed to be completely static and just show the station's name but here in the U.S. we do allow it to be changed on the fly so many stations update it frequently to show various text such as the artist and title of the song they're currently playing or in this case some information about the program they're currently broadcasting and down here is the Radio Text which is 64 characters which gives you much more space than this 8-character field on this station you can see they're scrolling their Program Service field to show the artist and title of the song they're playing as well as the station identification here's a station which is actually using their Program Service field properly it's just fixed at their call letters and is not being constantly scrolled to show the music they're playing they're putting that in the Radio Text field down here. other things this program can do is capture the RDS text to a text file
as well as record the audio from the radio and you can also seek through the stations on the dial by their format such as Oldies, Country, Classic Rock, Top 40, Soft Rock, and Adult Hits but no such fancy stuff over on AM all it says is the station's frequency and AM playing and here's the full version of the software and like I said the biggest difference is that it also includes a CD player but it also has this traffic feature because RDS allows the FM stations to indicate when they're broadcasting a traffic report so that if you have this option enabled it will automatically switch to that station when a traffic report comes on the air but no stations in my area are using that feature and I don't think it's widely used at all here in North America so I'm glad I finally got a chance to try out the Cadet PC Radio tuner card I'll assume it was just a peculiarity with my system that I needed to set it up manually and that the automatic configuration didn't work although the installation tips on the CD it came with did specifically mention needing to do that so apparently it was a rather common problem and the AM reception was better than I expected but to the average user it probably wouldn't have been worth the effort of needing to set up a special antenna for it and while it was neat to show the RDS data on the screen while it was tuning in those stations if the main point of having a tuner card in your computer was to listen to the radio in the background while you using your computer to do work or play solitaire or whatever then that would have been lost -- you wouldn't have seen it anyway so while it was a neat idea I can see why most people decided that instead of spending $70 to add a radio tuner card to their computer they could just take an ordinary radio they already owned and put it next to the computer and achieve the same basic result
2025-02-23 04:15
