Jonathan Davis asked,
| I am looking to purchase a timer for my MiniDisc player to record FM
| broadcasts of NPR daily. How much do MD timers cost? Are there any
| inherent problems that I should know about? Also, any timer tips and
| suggestions would certainly be appreciated.
There are no special MD timers. Any appliance timer will work. Just be
sure to get one that's settable digitally (such that you can select the
exact minute to turn on and to turn off and set the current time to the
minute), because those with analog dials or pointers are too fuzzy.
Some MD combo systems have their own built-in timers.
Radio schedules are also fuzzy, in my experience, so you might want to set
the timer to start the MD recorder about two minutes before the scheduled
beginning of the program and to run about two minutes past the scheduled end.
For example, I record a program from 5:35 to 6:00 AM weekday mornings; but
the station is so laid back about timing, and its clock, the timer's clock,
and my shelf system's clock can get out of sync, so I have the shelf system
turn the tuner on at 5:30 and off at 6:05, and the timer turns the MD re-
corder on at 5:33 and off at 6:03. Still, yesterday morning the program
ended only about twenty seconds before the timer shut the MD recorder off.
Radio Shack, last I checked, sold two models: a twenty-four-hour, one-event
unit and a seven-day, six-event unit. The latter was basically a repackaged
Intermatic DT7. Those two are large, and the buttons are unresponsive and
hard to press. They use a AA battery for keeping the time and saving the e-
vents. Intermatic also makes the DT17, which is smaller and easier to set;
it also has a nice feature that flips the time hour in and out of daylight
saving time with one press. I like it, except for one flaw: you can't cancel
an event except by clearing out the entire memory and current time and reen-
tering it all from scratch. The best you can do to get rid of an event is to
change it to duplicate another event that you're keeping, or to set both its
OFF and ON times to a time when you want the appliance off (OFF overrides ON
if a single event has both at the same time).
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