|Seems to me like you're unnaturally limiting yourself in this case. What if you wanted to upload the songs in the |middle of the night?

I know what your saying...that'd be the ideal case I agree.

|Shouldn't you just power the wireless ethernet device 100 percent of the time?

There's not much point if the EMPEG is turned off - unless it implements 'wake on LAN' or something similar (how feasible is that?).

|How much current does it draw if it's not transmitting?

According to the manual it's 30mA in standby, plus a bit more as I'd need to convert 12V to 5V, which I admit doesn't sound like a lot. However I don't use the car daily and the my type of car is notorious for flattened batteries even after only a few weeks as it (the alarm?), so I'm a bit paranoid about leaving anything on permanently.
As someone else said an auxiliary battery could be fitted, separate but charged by the car - if that went flat then at least the car would still be usable.

|I seem to recall Hugo discussing an idea that the Empeg might be able to do a brief wake-up every X seconds to look for ethernet
|packets, for just this sort of eventuality. Anyone have that thread link handy?

That sounds very interesting I'd like to know more about that...is this actually in the current software? If so how do I control it? Additional support in emplode would be useful too - ie to be able to wait until empeg wakes up and to keep the empeg awake while emplode is running - which doesn't seem to happen at the moment.

In this case though it would still make sense to link the power of the wireless convertor to when the empeg is operating (ie in this minimal wake up state).

S