“RADIO” is the brand on the box. It’s manufactured by Shenzhen Moliao Technology Company in China. I snagged it on Temu for $10.17 US including shipping for the retail box, radio, manual, wrist strap, internal rechargeable battery and USB-C charging cable. Temu now marks this as “Sold Out.” Amazon US has it for $21.99 and offers black, red and khaki.
It’s an MW/FM/SW Radio, Bluetooth speaker and Media Player. It has ATS, and a sleep timer in addition. The 1500 mAh internal battery is not user accessible without removing the back cover to the case.
Feature Summary:
Fit and Finish
No one would ever mistake this for an expensive radio. All the parts seem to fit together well enough, but the knobs look and feel cheap. The buttons work well, though. There is no kickstand, and no battery door.
Radio
The FM portion covers 64 – 108 MHz. MW supports 9 or 10 kHz step. SW spans 2.3 – 21.85 MHz. There are 50 memory preset locations, presumably for each band. There are four tuning methods: Automatic scan and store with a Delete function; scan for next station, tuning knob and direct frequency entry.
There doesn’t seem to be any way to change the FM band to start at 88 MHz resulting in far slower ATS scans for FM because of the empty territory scanned. I ran an ATS scan indoors and got 29 stations.
MW / FM
I took the radio out to the patio at midday to check out local reception:
As is typical for these inexpensive radios, MW performance is abysmal. FM, however, is upper tier. So this is an entertainment radio you might want to use to listen to FM.
Shortwave
The Q7 shares a common limitation with other ultra-low-end SW receivers and that is its inability to display frequency resolution beyond 10 kHz. It always shows the frequency in MHz with two digits to the right of the decimal point. One can see in my photo at the top of the article that there is a small “5” to the right of the frequency display; however, that doesn’t appear in the manual’s diagram of the display, and the digit never comes on. Unfortunate.
To enter SW frequencies, omit the final digit; for example, if you want 3330 kHz, then enter “333” and wait a second or two; the radio will tune to 3.33 MHz.
That 3.33 MHz signal is more than a place holder. Even with its 13.5″ (34.5 cm) telescopic antenna, I was able to pick up CHU from Ottawa, Canada, here in central Virginia both on 3.33 MHz and 7.85 MHz. The ATS scan didn’t pick them up, even though the signals were clear. The next day at 11 AM local time, I was able to pick up CHU on 14.67 MHz, again with the whip antenna.
There is also a tuning knob that is a very slow way to get from band to band.
One disappointment is that the play/pause control for media play does not work as Mute for the radio, a shortcoming shared with the Tecsun PL-990.
I went out later the next day when CHU was pretty weak. My Qodosen DX-286 picked it up ok with the telescopic antenna, but the Q7 only picked up faintly with a 20-foot wire antenna clipped on.
Media Player
It plays MP3, WAV, WMA, APE and FLAC. Input is from MicroSD/TF or USB flash drive. One can select the track by number. Media is supported up to 32G. There are no equalizer profiles.
Bluetooth
It connected quickly to Windows 11 and the play/pause button worked.
Audio
I wasn’t disappointed by the sound. Classical music was listenable — no subwoofer — but not bad either. I would describe it as crisp, but not tinny. The speaker is rated at 5W. The specifications say the frequency response is 45 Hz to 4.5 kHz.
Manual
The User Manual is just 4 pages of text, but it’s literate and I didn’t spot any errors in a quick scan. It’s a fairly straightforward device, and reference to the manual shouldn’t be needed often.
Operation
It works pretty much as I expected it to work, with no big snags. The main issue is that the user interface is a bit slow. Direct frequency entry requires a pause for the entry to take effect. The power switch is long press. ATS scans are slow. Switching between audio tracks is slow. The tuning knob is has to be turned a good deal to reach the next frequency. But if you’re listening to radio or music, controls are seldom used. No big deal.
Conclusion
This may well be the best $10 radio I have ever tested.