The USPS delivery site said they were returning it to sender, undeliverable because of insufficient address. They delivered it anyway. The address was mangled by jamming it together with no spaces between street number and name. Disaster averted.
My first impression was the radio, from seller CLOOBLUT, was in a real shipping box, and the internal product box wasn’t crushed at all.
I’ve hurried through this review because I really don’t think much of the product. I refer the reader back to my prior articles for some details:
It’s a cheap (under $23 with shipping) radio and music player. It’s not defective. Some observations and usage note follow.
It’s a plain MW/FM/SW radio and not a weather radio, despite the misleading “W” on the model number, “ALERT RADIO” printed on the front panel and WB specifications in the manual. Further, I have not been able to locate the purported “WB version” for sale. I’ve marked up the manual’s specifications table to emphasize this.
This is an inexpensive radio / music player. They’re selling on AliExpress today for under $23 with free shipping. It’s an MW/FM/SW radio and music player. In this short First Impressions post I’ll discuss packaging, look and feel, preliminary sound quality assessment, first look at the manual, and some questions that come to mind.
Caution: My First Impressions posts are tentative and subject to change in the final review.
It’s an AM/FM/SW radio, adding an emergency siren, Bluetooth speaker, music player (supported music formats not specified) from USB-A flash drive or MicroSD card, and sleep timer alarm. The radio has auto tune storage (ATS). There is a speaker and an earphone jack. While the radio sports digital signal processing, the user experience is purely analog. There are some LEDs to indicate band and mode. The tuning display is reminiscent of a slot machine, except that the digits don’t rotate independently.
In tiny printing around the faux speaker port on the back, visible in just the right lighting, is a feature list: “R&D: DISPU — FRULL BAND — RADIO — BT — MUSIC PLAY — SUPER BASS.” Maybe “FRULL” means “not all of MW.”
Continue readingIt’s a weakness. AliExpress sent me an email — 50% off, free shipping.
It cost $27.28 — that’s just $3 per band. Looks big! Actual size is 105 x 45 x 118mm (4.1 x 1.8 x 4.6 in). So it’s at least not tiny. It also comes in dark and light green color (reminds me of a HanRongDa HRD-700 back in the day). The “Service Manual“; however, is tiny. Supposedly the “9 bands” are MW, FM and SW-1-7. Usually a “W” suffix on the model number would indicate a weather band variant, but that’s not the case here.
Continue readingI rate FM radio performance by counting local stations I can hear down on my patio in the middle of the day. That’s simplistic, because daytime propagation varies and E-Skip happens. Not all stations are necessarily local and consistent.
Continue readingSporadic‑E (Es) is a propagation mode where radio waves in the 30–300 MHz range reflect off dense patches of ionization in the E‑layer of the ionosphere (≈90–120 km altitude). On the FM band (88–108 MHz), this produces long‑distance reception of stations 600–1500 miles away, often with strong, local‑quality signals.
Es clouds form when wind shear and atmospheric tides compress metallic ions (mostly Fe⁺ and Mg⁺) into dense layers. When the electron density spikes high enough, the layer becomes reflective at VHF frequencies.
Key triggers:
- Summer solstice season (May–August)
- Winter minor season (December–January)
- Strong wind shear in the upper atmosphere
- Thunderstorm complexes (sometimes correlate)
- Jet stream boundaries🤖
The package consists of a MW/FM/SW/WB radio with stereo speakers, plus a repeater — an external device that is a radio itself, able to relay received audio to the base radio. The repeater adds AIR band and VHF/UHF.
Let’s start with a video. It’s a transmission of Radio Romania at 01:33 UTC on 30-June-2026 on 9495 kHz.
In the upper right of the radio display is an antenna symbol with the letters *EXT* underneath; when solid on rather than blinking, the icon informs us that the radio is receiving an external signal from the W3 repeater. The repeater was on the back porch about 5 meters away, and connected to the repeater was the 3 meter wire antenna supplied in the W3 accessories pack. In my opinion, this is the “normal” use case for this product.
The “9.495 MHZ” tells the frequency, almost. The bandwidth is fairly wide, so the station is easily heard on 9.490 and 9.500 (noting that this is a strong signal). The little number “5” is blank on frequencies that are multiples of 10 kHz indicating that 5 kHz is the smallest tuning step on SW. The display shows signal to noise ratio (SNR) is 16 and the relative signal strength (RSSI) is 72.1
The video shows what an iPhone microphone picks up.
Continue readingI’ve been waiting to order this since early May when an early version appeared on the AliExpress website with prominent warning that SSB tuning step was 5 kHz and that there was no printed English manual, to be remedied by a new version on May 27 with a 0.5 kHz SSB tuning step. I left a message yesterday for the seller CLOOBLUT asking if the new version were available yet, and this morning when I looked for a reply, instead of a reply, there was a product listing of the new version.
