This one breaks from the soap bar format and instead gives us something which looks like a pound shop scan tune receiver. It's available in either silver or cherry red. The packge I received for the price of around nine pounds all in, came in a nicely presented magnetically clasped foam insert presentation box.
Inside, in addition to the transmitter itself came with a signal lead (3.5mm to 3.5mm jack) and a pair of Chinese use-once batteries. There was no four pole jack or iPod adaptor that I was hoping for, despite being illustrated in the eBay lot, but hey, honesty is an add on extra these days.
The signal lead is crap. It crackles everytime you breathe on the thing. A decent replacement lead kicks this issue from a state of frustration into a sordid memory.
The instructions came on a very simple A5 sheet, the writer clearly had American English as a first language and made a good job of describing this unit's functions.
Physical size is 54.75x52.75x20mm
The Meister is powered from a pair of internal AAA batteries. There is no provision for an external power source.
It has two power modes. In standby, a RTC displays the time in either 12hour or 24hour format, and on transmit, frequency is displayed.
The transmitter does not shut down if no audio signal is received over a given period.
Duration seems good, I'm still going strong after 50 hours.
I've not had a chance to test this yet with a high end audio source and receiver, but initial tests appear positive.
As usual, the ground of the signal lead is used to radiate the RF signal. Range is very low with nothing plugged in, but it seems good for 30 metres with the supplied lead. Certainly no lightweight in this respect.
The Meister tunes in 100kHz incriments from 87.0MHz to 108.5MHz so it covers everything expected in the UK, and goes out of band at both ends too. Not conservtve in this respect.
What happens if power is removed from the device? This is aspect pivitol to all users of this device, but a do or die situation when it is considered as an exciter.
When power is lost, i.e batteries fail, all settings default to factory defaults, and the RTC is reset.
There is no non volatile area which maintains either configuration or RTC.
I'm impressed, there are two piggybacked neatly laid out boards in there. The legend suggests the bottom right push switch as being SET/MP3/MIC. I'd love to know what this mic function is, it's mentioned enigmatically in the instruction sheet but I get the feeling that somehow the current firmware version does not support it.
On the back board, there is a chip which some ten year old sweatshop worker has been told to scrub over with a file so that it's unreadable. This stupid dirty trick will make it harder to identify, but by no means impossible. It's next to the audio jack, so I guess it's the stereo encoder.
In all, there are three chips in this device and three crystals.
There are lots of unoccupied positions on the back board.
My operators manual was a sheet of A3, but unusually, the writer seemed to have English as a first language. In fact, for me, there was nothing but English supplied. It didn't take too much head scratcing to drive this beast even without the manual, the only thing that's not obvious is that M3 whilst in standby mode allows you to set the RTC.
If you've lost your manual, or indeed if you want to explore the scope of this unit here's the operators manual verbatim.