Review of the Pure Highway in-car DAB portable

Posted by Dan 

The folks at Pure Radio were kind enough to lend me one of their Highway radios. I was very excited. What is it? It’s an in car DAB radio that you stick to your windscreen like a portable sat nav. It receives DAB radio stations and then re-broadcasts them to your normal car radio via FM.

 

Why would anyone want to do this? Ok, it’s not going to excite Mr and Mrs Radio 3 Golden Ears but it does offer a whole load of extra stations. 

 

So is it any good? Let's get the audio quality issue out of the way. Now, the car is not the best place to judge (or experience) audio quality. I carried out a simple A-B test flicking between Radio 1 FM and Radio 1 DAB (via FM). FM sounded fuller and richer. Nonetheless, to me, DAB (via FM) sounded acceptable. Radio 5 Live sounded way better via the Highway than via AM. Ditto Virgin.

 

Where the Highway really appeals is in clarity of reception. There is no fade as I go under bridges like you get with AM and I can listen to the Today 0810 interview without the annoying hiss/click and RDS retune I get on FM as I whizz past Fleet services on the M3.

 

My daily commute takes me around the M25 and down the M3. Not once on this journey do I get any burble or loss of signal. Neither do I have to retune the FM broadcast. This is pretty incredible because, as you can't actually see from the picture, I haven’t mounted the antenna to the window properly. Instead it is just thrown down on the seat next to me.

 

So it’s simple things that contribute to the Highway’s appeal. Simple things like this: normally I can’t get a decent 5 Live signal once I leave the M25. With the Highway I can. I like listening to 5 Live so this is good.

It's also simple things that provide draw backs. If you are thinking of getting a Highway, ask yourself: can I really be bothered with the faff of sticking, attaching, plugging and unplugging every time I get in the car? 

 

This is turning in to a long post so I’m going to cut to the chase and write a list of things I do like, things I don’t like and then a few things I’d like to see in a Highway II.

 

I do like:

• Excellent, clear reception
  
• Choice of stations
  
• It takes batteries, is portable and you can plug headphones in to it for out of car listening
  
• It has a line in and a line out – useful for plugging in iPods etc. Why don’t all car stereos have this as standard?!
  

 

I don’t like

• Faff! It needs to be set up every time I get in the car (I remove it from my parked car because I park on the street and I worry about disappointing thieves who want a sat nav)
  
• The batteries aren’t charged while it is plugged into the car
  
• Although it’s smaller than I thought it would be...it’s possibly a bit big
  
• One of the oft-quoted advantages of DAB is ‘ease of tuning’ – but the Highway is not as easy to tune as my built in stereo with station presets
  

 

I would change:

Top of my wish list for the Highway II would be an in-car "docking station" as opposed to the current fixing bracket. The difference would be that the docking station would have permanently set up power and antenna connections (possibly line in/out too). Faff would minimised as you only dock the device once rather than fix it to the bracket and then plug in the various wires etc ... so I'd use it on short journeys too.

 

Battery charging and a home docking station would be nice additions to the range.

 

I like the idea of a big red "random" button which you could hit when you are bored . I think it fits the driving use case nicely (but it might just suit me and my short attention span).