I’ve written product reviews on Amazon for years, over 300 of them. It’s not unusual for a product I write about here to have a corresponding Amazon review. I recently changed my public name on Amazon to “Blog or Die!” and here I am publishing a link to my Amazon content:
Blog or Die! Product Reviews on Amazon.com
The reviews are often simplified, and I write them for a different audience.
The radio arrived today from eBay seller Hisonic, costing me a paltry $19.99 plus tax. Here’s the stock photo again:
To tell the truth, I was contemplating sending it back as defective. Nothing worked. The radio came on and the buttons beeped when I pressed them, but nothing happened. I finally got “Radio” on the menu, but the SW, MW, FM buttons did nothing. It kept freezing up. I really thought I had a badly defective radio.
I was wrong. The radio isn’t defective; it’s buggy and weird. I was prepared for some of the weirdness based on my experience with the Degen DE28 and the Kaito KA29, contemporary menu-driven radios from the same manufacturer. One important concept is delay. There is a delay sometimes between when you hit a button and when the radio responds to the button. This can result in the radio getting behind. You can hold down the tuning slider for a little and release — the radio will keep tuning until it catches up. Sometimes, the button just doesn’t work and it requires multiple presses. Sometimes it starts tuning in the opposite direction from the button pressed. It can be frustrating to use.
The second confusing point is that one might think that viewing a menu item on the screen means that it is somehow active; for example, of you scroll through the options to Radio, one might well expect the SW, MW and FM buttons to play the radio. Not so fast, Tadpole. You must first press the MENU key and then you can select the band.
The other weirdness is that the dial light times out after a relatively short while, making it difficult to see that the Lock icon always comes on at the same time. The user gets the false impression that the radio is frozen or something. One uses the Lock button on the side of the radio a lot. The backlight timer can be set for 6 – 30 seconds (default 20). In addition to the display timeout lock icon on the upper right of the display, there is sometimes another lock icon on the upper left of the display. I think they are the same thing, only on different displays: menu vs radio.
When I first tried to use the device it was locked, but since I haven’t encountered it locked on power-on, and there doesn’t appear to be a way to prevent the radio from being accidentally turned on except the non-protruding power button. If the Lock button is pressed when the power is off, the date and time is briefly displayed.
One other very important operational concept: the buttons, even when they beep, may not actually work, and have to be retried one or more times. This was the cause for many an Amazon return.
The manual says the radio supports 20 languages, switchable in the Setup menu under “Languages.” The important thing for English users to know is that Language is the 6th entry under setup and that the second language in the list is English. The manual doesn’t specify the languages.
Here are the languages:
🤖The 4th entry may refer to Traditional Chinese (Big5 encoding). It was commonly in early electronics.
The radio displays its firmware version upon request: 20121120 V0.3.5.
The manual describes how to set the FM range, but not the MW step. Here’s how to do it:
Here are the results of the Daytime Band Scan. The results were very similar to the Kaito KA29.
The manual is mostly silent on the shortwave topic. Once the SW band is selected, repeated presses of SW button cycle through the 9 bands:
Now here is the mystery: repeatedly pressing the SW button cycles through these 9 bands, but the manual says shortwave coverage is 2.3 – 23 MHz. In fact when I first started pressing the button, I actually saw 2.3 MHz, but it went away.
What I can say is that an ATS scan (it’s in the menu) starts at 2.3 and goes to 23 MHz, not restricted by the band boundaries. It has 99 presets for FM, 50 for MW and 99 for SW, or at least that’s what the manual says. When I ran the SW band scan, it started with 50 even thought I had pre-cleared the memory. ATS just keeps cycling through the frequencies until you stop it. When you do stop it, you’re in an all-band display where you can scan through all the frequencies.
ATS on Shortwave stored CFRX in Toronto, 6070 kHz, at around 00:55 UTC here in central Virginia with the 45 cm telescopic antenna. Use the M+/M- buttons to scan through the station presets.
Shortwave tunes in 5 kHz steps.
The radio can play music from a TF/Micro SD card, and it also has internal memory. Plug the USB cable into a computer and treat the radio as an external 4G disk drive. In addition to playing files, the device can also record from radio and an internal microphone.
The speaker is pretty small, but you can get a decent little punch for it, at least on MP3 files.
Here is a link to my Amazon.com review, “Why you probably don’t want this radio.”
This little exercise is good practice for the incoming Degen DE23.
I was surprised to learn that this radio is still for sale by Amazon in Mexico at a price equivalent to $117.25 USD. I was fortunate enough to find an unused one on eBay for $35.
This unit, introduced on May 23, 2013, will, I hope match or exceed the sound quality of its contemporary Kaito KA29/Degen DE29, but in stereo. The two images above and below should be roughly to the same scale.
My intention is to use it as an external speaker for other radios rather than a radio itself. Nevertheless, when it comes, I’ll do the obligatory daytime AM/MW band scan.
The Amazon Mexico product description doesn’t mention that it has AUX input (panic), but the Tecsun product description does (relief).
The size is 160 x 65 x 40 mm (6.3 x 2.6 x 1.6 inches). It uses a BL-5C battery. Additional controls plus the input and output jacks are on the top. It’s supposed to arrive by May 14.
This is my personal point of view.
I buy radios on Amazon. I review them here. Some I like and some I don’t like. If I don’t like the radio and I think it performs poorly, I don’t return it. I feel that if I buy something I don’t like, that means I did inadequate research before purchasing. If the radio is defective or is different from the product description, then it’s returned in a heartbeat. If I just don’t like it, I donate it to the local Goodwill store.
People have told me that that they pay for Amazon Prime, which gives them a liberal return policy, and that they are paying for the return. That may pay for the return shipping, but it doesn’t compensate the merchant. If you return something with the seal broken, Amazon will not resell it. The seller has the option of paying Amazon to ship it to them (prohibitive if the seller is in China) or have it destroyed. I’ve had the opportunity to handle about 35 radios returned to Amazon and only 3 of them had any defect whatever.
That reflects what I knew up until I watched the CNBC video below. I hope Amazon shoppers will watch it.
What you see is a circuit board, a battery (lower left) and the speaker lower right.
The story starts with how weak the speaker sounds. I thought some earphones might help but they didn’t; in fact, I could barely hear anything on earphones. Perhaps an obvious flaw in the earphone jack could be found. Opening the radio proved an adventure. One can see a rather substantial screw pillar on the lower right; this is coming from the back of the radio. Three screws came out with some effort, but the 4th screw just spun around with no effort. It turns out that the screw head was broken off (not by me), leaving the rest of a very long screw holding both parts of the case firmly together. The only solution that worked was to use a fine-tipped soldering iron to heat the screw enough to melt the plastic to release it.
Continue readingThis little trek started when I found an old weather sensor in a drawer. These come with weather stations to show what the temperature is remotely (or wind speed, humidity or rainfall).
The specific FCC ID for my sensor is RNERF100MTX, sold by Chaney Instrument Co. under the ACURITE brand. I found a manual and learned that the device transmits in the ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) band that spans 433.05 – 434.79 MHz. Weather sensors typically operate around 433.92 MHz, but the exact frequency can vary depending on the manufacturer and device.
I also learned from my research that such devices use simple off/on encoding. That’s why my original title, “Listening to the Weather,” had to be changed. I have a few devices that can receive the ISM band frequencies, but I selected an RTL-SDR dongle since there wasn’t going to be anything to listen to.
Continue readingThe radio arrived today, a day early, from AliExpress. The box didn’t look too good, but the contents were fine.
The photo doesn’t carry the idea of how small this is. The radio is about 3 1/4″ wide and the outside diameter of that donut antenna is less than 4″.
Continue reading