Radio reviews

Radio, Print, and Online General Radio and Digital
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Thought I’d start a new topic on radio reviews.

This radio I got from ebay.

Good things

  1. Very light in weight. Nice to put in pocket. Too many things need to go in pocket these days.
  2. DAB reception adequate.
  3. Rechargeable
  4. Bluetooth, those new flagship phones with no headphone jack. This is solution.
  5. I like on off switch.
  6. Whilst no presets quite straight forward to use, very simple.
  7. Quite cheap!

Not so good

  1. FM radio trash. In mono.
  2. Some low DAB bit stations in mono, like FUN Superdigi, the higher bit station sound ok but not as good as the Sangean.
  3. Taking phone calls, the microphone is in the the device itself. So you need to hold the radio near your mouth.
  4. No presets but not the end of the world.

Conclusion, not good for for DXing or FM radio, but really light in pocket not bulky at all. I like the bluetooth feature too. I definitely need another radio to listen to FM but this is good to have if you plan to listen to dab only in a good reception area, also you don’t care the audio quality or don’t need to listen to FM radio or low bit dab radio.

I’ll post more or my radio reviews as I get time to do them :).

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2

Now for the Sony https://www.sony.com.au/electronics/dab-radios/xdr-p1dbp.

Bought it from jbhifi a few years back.

Good things

  1. The preset buttons on the top. This is really convenient can be FM or DAB. Plus you got the other presents hidden in the menu. 10 of them DAB and FM pretty good.
  2. Great loud speaker, good sound/loud.
  3. You can manually tune in DAB frequency.

Not so good

  1. DAB Reception, I found using the headphone jack I don’t get as good reception as I do with the Sangean. I played around and removed the telescopic aerial it seem to help, but then whats the point :slight_smile: . For the price I expected better with reception. Bit more challenging on FM to see if it has the same issue or not. At least I can get SWR FM next to HHH so it has pretty good sensitivity.
  2. Reception metre hidden in menus. I would really like to see a reception metre on the display all the time.
  3. A bit heavy for a pocket radio. This is more a traditional transistor radio if this is what you are looking for then perfect

Overall a great compact radio to have at your desk and listen to. The sound quality is good with earphones but the receptions of dab can be flaky when on the go. For DX nerds I might pass on this, but for those who just want to listen the radio only it does the job well.

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If you weren’t listening to music - say, you wanted to listen to the radio commentary at the football - is it decent enough?

4

Yeah I use it to listen to the cricket. DAB radio isnt good at the ground, too much delay. I would take a trusty am radio for that.

5

I bought this Yamaha micro hi fi today (on sale for $288 at Hardly Normal).

(Click on the ‘Features’ or ‘Specs’ tab for info).

It is a great buy for the price!

Very good sound, and good reception on both FM and DAB.

Only quibbles so far.

  • It will only activate stereo on FM if you use the automatic (seek) tuning option, manual tuning will stay in mono only.
  • The Australian manual I found online appears to suggest that it has RDS. It doesn’t seem to work here (curses!). But then very few micro/mini systems have it. The Denon D-M41 is the only one I know of that does but is $899.
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6

I just bought this one. I wont get it until Sept or Oct but look forward to getting it.

https://www.amazon.com.au/Tecsun-PL398MP-Digital-Shortwave-Speakers/dp/B0062DOYWE

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That’d be a good replacement for my old PL-390!

That was my first Tecsun radio, it fell to bits though, not great build quality though.

9

I know I said I wasn’t going to… but I did… just buy yet another digital radio. My 7th portable unit.

This one…

JB had it at 30% off last weekend ($174.30). The main attractions were that it was a Sangean, one of my favourite DAB brands and that it had rotary controls for tuning and volume. And the price! Don’t know that I would have paid $249 for it.

Very happy with it, reception and sound quality are both excellent on FM and DAB, and the rotary controls are easy to use.

Only downsides are that it’s bigger and heavier than others (which I knew would be the case), and the orange backlight isn’t as pleasant to my eyes as the light blue ones most other radios have.

2 Likes
10

can we have a long conversation regarding radios…

Ill start with a question I had, Whats a decent radio to buy when I go offroading?

11

To what locations? And what type of stations are you trying to receive? AM. FM, Shot Wave?

12

hey im sorry but i should have worded my question better, I’m looking to buy a cb radio or gme, I’m not sure which one I should get

13

After doing some research on a few websites i actually found that ebay has some decent deals, same with amazon. im based in Sydney Australia and i wanted to look for someting local so i dont have to wait to long for shipping especially during the covid times xd. I found a few websites but there was one that caught my eye, it was called gadgetcity and they have a store very close to my house, on their website I wanted to look for some good deals and find out which ones best, I feel like this one will go alright as it has some cool features like Bluetooth and such, GME XRS-330C CONNECT SUPER COMPACT BLUETOOTH ENABLED UH. Besides that I thought ill share some other finds like GME Vehicle UHF XRS 330 Connect Compact Radio Black

Both decent looking gme radios, what are your opinions on these products?

14

New radio now available with AM, FM and DAB!

A bit of a rarity to have all 3 bands on the one radio, particularly at this price point ($109)

https://www.harveynorman.com.au/richter-dab-plus-fm-am-potable-digital-radio.html

What I’ve noted so far

Pros: Appears to have RDS for FM
Cons: Has tuning buttons, not a rotary knob. Though having 20 presets on each band helps here.
Unknown: Stereo sound via headphones.

Wouldn’t mind getting one of these next time I’m in Sydney. Looks like a Harvey Norman exclusive.

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15

I’d think that might have a pretty decent sound from the size of the speaker (even though it’s mono), having said that though, my work bought us all one of these Richter pocket radios for monitoring purposes when we’re out & about, https://www.harveynorman.com.au/richter-pocket-personal-digital-radio.html it’s not bad for both FM & DAB reception, & the sound through the headphones is quite nice, but the little inbuilt speaker is woeful & a tin can could sound much better, the telescopic antenna is so fine, you have to be very careful with it, otherwise you’ll bend/break it easier than an old twig & the overall quality of the radio is not that good, especially for the $100 price range, mine will often lock up if you change the station too much to quickly & the only way you can get anything to work again is pull the battery out & start again.

Being Richter & the quality of their speakers, I expected much more from this radio’s sound, even though it’s a tiny speaker I thought it’d sound much better. It’s okay for what I use it for at work, but if I’d have actually paid for it, I would’ve been very disappointed in this purchase, around the $30 price point is what I’d put on this radio for the quality of it, in line with the other AM/FM old style (70’s-80’s) transistor radios.

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16

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Quick review of this Paslode radio. Good that it does AM/FM/DAB+ as well as Bluetooth and aux in.

The antenna it comes with isn’t great for indoor reception for poorer stations (pictured is it on SWR 99.9 reporting full reception but no RDS. That required replacing the rubber coated antenna with a classic metal one and having it point down to the ground).

Audio wise it’s okay but mono and lacking in treble, especially on lower volume settings. Changing the EQ to custom and turning up the treble and turning on “loudness” seems to fix this mostly but still sounds muddy even on strong FM stations. May just sound better turned up.

Display is good. Pulls DAB art but doesn’t seem to show song info from Bluetooth.

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17

I have recently ordered this FM/DAB+ radio from Aliexpress to hopefully replace the TEF radio I was given for Christmas and hopefully as a proof of concept for receiving DAB+ on the go in a bus:

I noticed that it seems to have the same UI as the Paslode radio above. The LCD doesn’t seem common in portable radios (unless you shell out $150+ for a Sangean).

Has anyone had any experience with these?

Also speaking of Sangean, it’s a shame that their range of portable radios do not have dedicated batteries and require you in most cases to buy rechargeable batteries.

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Received it this afternoon, so first impressions:
Good build quality.
The speaker quality seems very good even on max volume (which is quite loud).
Screen quality is good.
Supports DAB+ and RDS data as well as setting time from radio.
FM reception seems okay for indoors, hard to judge.
Came with a manual which is nice

Some negatives thus far:
No way to set the arrow keys to just go through the presets. They just bring up the station list on DAB+ and scan next/prev on FM.
The volume keys either goes though the info screens or brings up the settings menu. It’s a long press to change volume.
MicroUSB for charging.

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19

After a day of using this on the road I can say that the DAB+ reception is quite good although there were some marginal areas (Top Ryde-Rhodes-SOP) that would likely just be fixed with a longer antenna.

Second half of my shift I just used Bluetooth with Totally Radio Greatest Hits.
I can report that the battery life is quite good even when it’s a bit above middle volume level. It survived my 9.5-hour shift (including a 40-minute meal break) with it being on 1/3 bars and red at the end. Although I did set the screen timeout to 10 seconds that may have helped.

The speaker was still quite good although overtime you consider it a little bit thin but there are EQ presets that might fix it.

I would recommend it if you wanted a portable DAB/FM/BT radio with an LCD screen but did not need a TEF chip (I did not really test the FM side of things at all).

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20

I’m not sure how long the current antenna is, but a longer antenna for DAB+ will more than likely actually make reception worse.

Big mistake often made, I even find myself doing it often, is thinking a bigger(longer) antenna will give better reception because the bigger the antenna, the more signal it’s going to pick up right, not always, if you’re in a good or reasonably good signal area, you want the antenna to ideally be half wavelength, (in length) which in the case of DAB+ in Sydney would be 725cm long for a whip style antenna, such as on a portable radio, the other half of the antenna is internal to the radio to make a dipole, but the internal half isn’t adjustable & is probably not the ideal length anyway for a true dipole, but it helps.

If you make the antenna length too short (shorter than half wavelength), it’s not going to pickup all the signal power, so you’ll get a weak signal, as you start to make it longer than half wavelength, you start to pickup the wave as it’s crest is changing from full positive to the trough at full negative (or vice versa) & the power in the wave will actually start to cancel itself out, giving you a weaker signal strength.

Antennas on portable radios are generally made of a length more suitable for FM, as you can always make it shorter for higher frequency stations, but even then, they’re mostly under length, as for half wavelength of an FM frequency, the antenna would be too long & unwieldy for a small portable radio at 1.5m long (half wavelength) for middle of the band 98.1MHz frequency.

At work, directly under the tower some of the radios we use for monitoring the FM & DAB+ (particularly), even half wavelength is too long & we’ll get better DAB+ reception with the antenna length at 30 - 40cm long (roughly 1/4 wavelength).

Do some testing with the antenna at short/er lengths & see if the signal is better in those areas where you had marginal reception.

Disclaimer: Personal opinion, not the opinion of my employer (TXA), I do know/note there are still quite a few areas around Sydney where there is weak or no DAB+ reception, no matter how hard you try on a portable radio, honestly to cover the Sydney licence area (forget overspill areas) to FM equivalent coverage on DAB+ we’d probably need to install another 4 or 5 in-fill translators, & currently there’s not enough listeners to make it financially viable.

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21

It’s shorter than the one that came with the TEF radio (which I have now replaced it with), my theory for bigger antenna was based on that it was marginal enough that that a slight antenna adjustment could bring the signal back (for reference this was for listening to FUN Classic Hits and the radio was located in the small area given below the bus computer).

It worked 90%+ of the time for both ABC and then FUN Classic Hits (which is much better than the static and interference of AM and WSFM) which is a success in itself.

Streaming Killed the DAB+ Star although until there is a lower latency ABC 702 and ABC Sport stream AM/DAB+ is king.