One of the complaints about some add-on receivers is that you can potentially clutter up your dashboard with a separate control unit. Hidden add-on receivers usually work with the DAB tuner hidden in a box behind the dashboard. The advantages of these units is that if you are happy with your existing head unit, you can keep it and still enjoy DAB!
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| AutoDAB |
The box is connected to your existing FM/AM aerial, as well as a DAB aerial. The box is also connected to the vehicle's power supply and has an output to the FM/AM aerial input of your existing car radio. These systems pretend to be an FM radio station, you simply pick a spare FM frequency, store it as a preset and hear the DAB station like you would an FM one. Your existing car radio needs to have RDS because this is used to display the name of the DAB station, and any menu options.
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| Kinetic Digitizor |
Some of the systems available, such as the AutoDAB system, also require a connection to your car's CAN bus. The CAN bus connection allows the DAB tuner to be controlled using the steering wheel controls when in DAB mode. Functionality depends on your car, but even if you only have an up/down button for station selection, you can control the DAB menus with a mixture of long and short button presses. Other systems, such as the Kinetic Digitiser use a remote control instead of steering wheel controls.
Disadvantages of these systems is that navigation can be slow, especially if you have a head unit that takes a couple of seconds to update the RDS display. Back seat drivers might also be annoyed that the driver can only control some units, by virtue of needing steering wheel controls to function (although that might be seen as an advantage to some drivers). These units all seam to tune alphabetically using a stored station list too, so going on long road trips will require frequent re-tunes, however this shouldn't be a problem for drivers that just drive around the same town.
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