Review: Pure Highway 300Di

Over a year ago I bought a car which had a fairly decent head-unit, but with no FM. So rather than replace it I purchased a Pure Highway 300Di. At the time I put a review of it on YouTube, which you can view below.

The Pure Highway 300Di is more expensive than it's predecessor, the original Pure Highway, however it also has a few more features and comes with a much better aerial. This device is a permanent add-on, it needs to be wired directly to your vehicle's battery supply and the aerial is an external glass mount type. Unless you are confident with car electrical systems, it is best left to a professional to install. Halfords offer a fitting servce, but I don't trust them with my car, so I got mine installed for a modest fee by an independent car audio garage.

What makes the Pure Highway 300Di special compared to other in-car DAB systems is that it has twin DAB tuners. Whilst you can only listen to one channel at a time, the other tuner is always scanning in the background for new stations to add to the station list and deleting stations that become out of area. It isn't a perfect feature though, because if you drive through a tunnel with no DAB reception it can take a short while to repopulate the channel line-up when you do regain reception again. It'd be nice if there was a way for both tuners to scan for stations (to speed up the process) when all stations are lost, but this is likely to be an infrequent occurrence and to be blunt isn't really much of an issue for day to day use.

I've read that some people are put off by this device because it might look like a SatNav and attract potential thieves, but if you watch the video, you'll see that I have mine installed in a discrete location, so it is possible to hide the controller out of sight if I want too. If you aren't bothered about having the controller in a discrete location, you can also slide it out from it's cradle and hide it somewhere else. However, if it did get stolen the joke is on the thief as the controller doesn't do anything on it's own. The DAB receiver is actually contained within a black box which is placed behind the dashboard by the installer.

Finally, the Pure Highway 300Di does come with an external glass-mount aerial. It's pretty decent. It's powered and the whip detaches should you want to take your car through a car wash. Because it is an external glass mount aerial, it is possible to remove at a later date should you wish to. Whilst an external glass mount aerial isn't as good as a roof mounted aerial would be, you will not have any issue for day to day reception within officially served DAB areas, and some fringe reception will be possible too. 

Hang on a minute... the Alpine EZi-DAB looks a lot like this unit
You'd be right in thinking the Pure Highway 300Di and the Alpine EZi-DAB look similar, and that's because they are the same basic unit. Although made by Pure, the Apline unit also has the option to change the colour of the backlight, and it comes supplied with a different style of aerial.

Features

• Pause/rewind live radio
• USB input to play MP3 files
• audio output to head unit via line out or FM retransmission
• twin tuner - automatic station list updates
• stations are listed in alphabetical order
• external glass mounted aerial provided