Just How Terrible Is A New Portable Radio???

Rant mode: ON I agree with you, Fran...the old stuff rocks! And what's with this pretentious turning-of-slide-switches-into-rotary-switches, using the PCB as a greased mechanical vehicle to make THAT happen? WTF??? And don't get me started on the two-wrong-settings "tone control". Obviously, bad "engineering" pushes my buttons (or flips my switches), and offends my sensibilities. Thank you for drawing attention to these issues. If it was required (cheaper) to drop in a do-everything chip, it's too bad the chip itself couldn't have been better-designed.

Yes, I suppose that is understandable. Thank you!

It's fine for regular strength signals but it won't bring in weak stations, which I expected.

Fran Blanche

So, how would you rate the receiver's sensitivity and selectivity? Passable? adequate?

I doubt if anybody is really surprised about the state of affairs with modern consumer electronics. The real question here is how much these things can be hacked to become decent. Would be interesting to see what mods could turn this little kitchen radio comparable with previous generations...

Marek

You think those knobs are nutty? Wait till you see some of the contraptions I make!

DAB is a hot mess of proprietary rubbish. That is where is all went wrong when it became a paid for standard. From Wikipedia the real reason it has been pushed. "Less unlicensed ("pirate") station interference The specialised nature, limited spectrum and higher cost of DAB broadcasting equipment provides barriers to unlicensed ("pirate") stations broadcasting on DAB. In cities such as London with large numbers of unlicensed radio stations broadcasting on FM, this means that some stations can be reliably received via DAB in areas where they are regularly difficult or impossible to receive on FM because of interference from unlicensed radio stations. " Not quite the Spirit of Radio is it?

veritanuda

Nice video! Loved that old fashioned analogue dial with the typical 'ski lift' wheel

I was surprised you found a straight-forward analogue radio without DAB or some kind of gizmo stuck on the side like bluetooth or an mp3 player. I wonder what other such old devices are still manufactured in something close to their original form?

You could probably improve the "tone control" by playing around with some component values on the board.

Not that bad for a new one. That tone control/pot was bad though... Thanks for sharing

Thanks. I subscribe because we seen to be curious about many of the same things. Enjoyed your sharing this.

M. Ní Sídach

Earlier this year I bought a "new" portable AM/FM/shortwave radio. I say "new" because it was actually made in 2015. It was remarkably difficult to find one. This one has nice features, notably RDS and a synchronous detector. All the signal processing is DSP.

Laura Halliday

I like videos like that where you buy cheap things, tear them down and compare.

MrMobodies

Nice tear-down video and you nailed the design. How about a follow-up video where you mod the tone control so it sounds better. Thanks for sharing your videos!

David Blake

Your backwards then forwards tip for self tappers is one I've definitely taken on board.

Dr Andy Hill

Lot of air in there!! I agree it could have a good sound but let down by lack of proper tone variable control lets it down.

Dr Andy Hill

That internal AM antenna looks "vintage," I think, because nobody's yet found a way to make a small AM antenna that works well other than by wrapping a ferrite core with Litz wire. So they're still manufactured and used to this day. I once had an old radio with a much larger ferrite rod and it pulled in AM stations infinitely better than any other AM/FM radio I've used!

Circuitmike

Those knobs are definitely weird, why make them different? I'd like to see a video of your radio collection, though. There looked to be some very interesting things in it.

David Peaker

I had a GE portable radio that, before all cell phones went digital, would pick up cell calls around it. Some interesting conversation were heard!

William Alsing

Love the old AM pocket radios. They were my source for transistors as s kid, Used one to see if the SWTPC 6800 kit was working before I had the terminal built.