My new old stock KA1101 has arrived from eBay seller detroitmetromart, and I was excited to get into the box.
Unboxing
Despite the radio being 20 years old, it really was new old stock and looked like it had just come from the factory. The case was flawless, the display crystal clear, and the radio worked just fine.
It came with all the accessories except the rechargeable batteries that some smart person removed before their leakage did too much damage. The contents were perfect but a bit of material had leaked through the plush plastic tray and underneath. It was visible, but nothing was affected.
Performance
I tried the radio briefly on my strong local MW station, FM and CFRX, Toronto on 6070 MHz. I was pleased. CFRX was clear on the 29″ telescopic antenna. My package arrived too late in the day for me to do my daytime band scan, but the following day, I added it to the list below.
MW reception was not remarkable, but FM was quite good.
I did discover one odd thing. When I plugged in the external antenna, CFRX didn’t seem much stronger, and when I added the ground, it disappeared. Nevertheless, in other testing I did not see this peculiarity.
Look and Feel
The plastic felt a little cheap compared to modern standards, but it’s definitely OK. I thought the radio looked good. The control markings on my silver cased model were clear and sharp. The display was readable.
Audio
The speaker was clear, but low-end. With good headphones the sound was nice. The radio has a Music/News switch. In the music position the volume was very low and there was some hiss on every station; it turned out that there was some corrosion on the switch and switching it back and forth a few times cleared the problem. FM is stereo. The radio can be turned up quite loud, especially with headphones.
Likes and Dislikes
Likes:
- Direct Frequency entry
- Local/DX switch (SW only)
- Dial light suppressed in daylight
- Easy to set clock that is visible when the unit is off
- Key Lock
- Wide/Narrow AM setting
- News/Music switch
- Ample telescopic antenna
- Good SW performance
- Reliable button presses
Dislikes:
- No mute button
- Shortwave separated into 2 bands
- Not full shortwave coverage (3.0 – 26.1 MHz)
- 50 MHz FM step
- Only 5 kHz SW step
- No clock display when radio on
- Direct frequency entry has to be prefixed with a button and sometimes suffixed
- Defaults to 99 minute sleep timer (auto-off) when first powered on
- Operating Manual needs editing — some poor translation
- Full rechargeable batteries show 2 out of 3 bars.
- User has to specify how long to charge batteries
- The Enter button does 5 different things
- No tuning knob
- No signal strength display
While the dislikes list is longer than the likes, some things are more important than others, SW performance being the most important one.
Overall, I rather like the little fellow.
Notes
Unlike the Degen DE1101 Operating Manual, the Kaito version does explain how to set the 9K/10K step for MW.
I’m doing this in a bit of a hurry because in the same mail delivery, my Sangean ATS-909 came and I want to dig into it!