Looking for the Ultimate Travel Radio

I like to take my shortwave listening hobby with me when I travel.

Tecsun PL-380

I think my first international trip with a radio was in 2011 and the radio was a Tecsun PL-380 that I bought around the end of 2011. I think the first trip with it was to Costa Rica in 2012.

I traveled with this radio a number of times and found its Easy Tuning Mode (ETM) scanning to be a very nice feature. Each time I went to a new town I could scan for what was there in its own memory bank. The radio was powered by AA batteries, rechargeable in the radio. It lacked a few features that would have been nice:

• External antenna jack
• Lighted keys
• SSB
• Full coverage to 30 MHz

Tecsun PL-330

I sold the PL-380 and replaced it with the Tecsun PL-330 that filled in three of those nice features: SSB, antenna jack and full SW coverage. It’s the radio I took on my most recent trips, shown here on a ship off the west coast of Norway.

Raddy RF75A

I took a 3-day car trip down to the historical sites in coastal Virginia including Jamestown and Williamsburg in 2024, and since the location wasn’t all that far from home, I didn’t think I would be receiving anything special. The radio I took wasn’t anything special either, a Raddy RF75A whose main virtue is its tiny size (and it does receive AIR and Weather bands). App control makes up for the lack of number keys.

That small size was its downfall. It must have slipped into a crack in the hotel room and got LEFT BEHIND. This story does point one feature desirable in a travel radio: limited financial loss if it becomes casualty of travel.

So What are the Features I Really Want?

What I’ve found traveling is that there will be only a few opportunities to do any serious listening, and those will be outdoors. It’s best to have a radio that can fit in a pocket. While I did receive VOLMET transmissions in New Zealand, that’s unusual and I really won’t often have time for SSB.

Here’s a feature list:

• Light weight, taking up minimal space in luggage
• A good radio
• Support for external antenna (reel antenna such as the Sangean AN-60
• Earphone jack
• Easy to read in the dark
• Operable without a manual
• Has longwave (for some countries)
• Not a big loss if there is a casualty
• Good ATS

The Decision

I certainly could just continue taking the Tecsun PL-330. It meets all the criteria, but it is also a radio I don’t use much at home largely because the buttons are small and I end up rekeying frequencies multiple times. My go to radio at home is the Qodosen DX-286 unless SSB is involved and in that case it’s the Tecsun PL-990 that I would never take on a trip for its size, weight and cost.

The DX-286 uses more energy than the PL-330, but I’m not going to put in multi-hour stints of listening and there are ample opportunities to recharge (plus I can take an extra battery). It doesn’t get SSB, but I really don’t need SSB on the road. It’s also nice for travel because it can put times from two zones on the display at the same time. And it has wonderful buttons.

It comes with a hard plastic case, but I’ll use the nylon pouch it shares with the SR-286 (also available as an accessory on Amazon).

But wait! Could I take two radios? If the postal gods are true to their word, a second radio will arrive the day before my trip, a, SI4732 Portable Mini, also called the ATS Mini.

This is supposedly the new version with the earphone jack amplifier. It cost like $26, so there’s no big loss if something goes wrong. The antenna, whether the donut pictured or the telescopic, takes literally no space, and it has the added bonus of supporting SSB, should that somehow become an issue.

I toyed with the thought of bringing a 3rd radio, an RTL-SDR blog SDR that plugs into the tablet that I’ll be taking with me on the trip, but that would be awkward to use outside a hotel room, and the RFI from the hotel would make the exercise pointless.

Conclusions subject to change without notice