Voyage of Discovery: Degen 1131

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.

Second Impressions

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 power button doesn’t protrude. 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 may have to be retried one or more times. This was the cause reviewers cited 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, but here is the list:

🤖The 4th entry may refer to Traditional Chinese (Big5 encoding). It was commonly used in early electronics.

The radio displays its firmware version upon request: 20121120 V0.3.5.

Radio

FM/MW

The manual describes how to set the FM range, but not the MW step. Here’s how to do it:

1. From startup, use the +/- keys to make sure “Radio” is displayed.
2. Press Menu to enter the Radio function
3. Press MW to enter the MW radio band
4. Press Menu to go into the MW radio band options
5. Use the “+” button to scroll down to “MW Spacing Switc” and press Menu
6. The radio should exit to the MW radio display with the channel spacing set to the other value from what it was when you started.

Here are the results of the Daytime Band Scan. The results were very similar to the Kaito KA29.

Shortwave

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:

• 60m: 5 – 5.6 MHz
• 49m: 5.8 – 6.4 MHz
• 41m: 6.9 – 7.5 MHz
• 31m: 9.3 – 9.9 MHz
• 25m: 11.5 – 12.1 MHz
• 22m: 13.3 – 13.9 MHz
• 19m: 15.1 – 15.7 MHz
• 16m: 18.4 – 18 MHz
• 13m : 21.4 – 22 MHz

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. [Update: when I tried ATS again, it started with memory location 00.] ATS just keeps cycling through the frequencies until you stop it (press the “+” key). 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.

MP3

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.”

Next

This little exercise is good practice for the incoming Degen DE23.