Travel Radio

So I’m going on vacation for a while, and of course I have to pick a radio to take along.

Tecsun PL-660

I was digging in the cabinet and came across the vinyl fold-over case for my Tecsun PL-660 and felt a spark of affection and for a brief moment I thought I might actually take it on the trip. Practicality reared its ugly head: the radio is heavy, I can’t charge the batteries in the radio itself thereby requiring a separate AA battery charger and ATS isn’t useful on this radio. It’s still a very nice radio that I should get out and use more.

Tecsun PL-330

For years I took my Tecsun PL-380 before I sold it and bought a PL-330 which is a very good candidate — compact, supports SSB, supports external antenna and has the fantastic ETM+ scan. The downside is those tiny buttons that only work half the time. But with that said, tuning through the ETM+ scans doesn’t require button pushing and I’ve traveled with it before with good results.

Raddy RF75A

Not so very long I took a short trip to Williamsburg, Virginia, and grabbed my Raddy RF75A. It’s definitely tiny. It also covers VHF and weather band. It turns out that family activities consumed most of my spare time and the hotel wasn’t a good listening area. Still this is a respectable radio. The downside is that an external antenna cannot be plugged in (but of course could be clipped on). On the plus side, it has a flashlight.

Truth be told, it slipped off the side of the hotel bed into a crack and was left behind. A sign of respect for this radio is that I bought a replacement when I returned home.

Qodosen DX-286 / ATS Mini V3S

I took two radios on my last trip, the Qodosen DX-286 and a very tiny ATS Mini V3S. The Qodosen has good ATS (very fast), but even more useful is its AUTO tuning mode, where a turn of the knob skips to the next station. The buttons are excellent. The ATS mini covered the SSB use case (which didn’t come up on the trip) and the really cool thing about this radio is its EiBiSpace station schedule download feature over Wi-Fi. The radio can tell you what it’s receiving in plain text. Both of these radios support FM RDS (Tecsuns do not).

MALAHITEAM MLite-880 et al.

And then there is my new MLite-880. Like the PL-660, it’s bigger and heavier. I don’t have a spare battery for it yet. It doesn’t have a internal MW antenna. It doesn’t appear to have ATS and its AUTO tuning mode has never worked for me.

I also stumbled on the Sparkelec DP-666 and decided it wasn’t worth the re-learning curve, plus it suffers from interference and I’ll be in large cities.

Conclusion

I have a pile of radios to pick from (around 69 right now). At home my daily driver is the DX-286 and I think I’ll take that on the trip, and throw in the ATS Mini just in case.

The DX-286 is in its accessory fold-over case (not an affiliate link). This includes AC adapters (one extra to lend to a fellow traveler who loses theirs), Euro Type C adapters, charging cables, Sangean ANT-60 reel antenna, SMA telescopic antenna for the mini, ball-point pen, notebook, earphones, 5 Euros and a flashlight.

Update

Well, that was much ado about nothing. I took the DX-286 plus an ATS Mini V3S. I couldn’t get the ATS Mini to connect to my iPhone to give it the network address to download EiBiSpace data and ended up not using it. And due to the busyness/tiredness of the trip, I only had one radio session in Cologne, where I picked up Iran on 5890 kHz at 20:39 UTC. Also, instead of the familiar CFRX, Toronto, I piked up Radio 292 from Germany on 6070, and KBS World Radio in German on 3975. Some Chinese stations were there too. I couldn’t find a place to string an antenna on the ship where someone might want to walk, so that stayed in the bag.