I’ve been into numbers and utility stations for a while now and am in the market for a good shortwave radio. It should be easy to use, portable and sensitive enough to pick up weak signals.
What radio should I look into buying?
Robin
What’s your price range?
As low as possible, but I can go a couple hundred dollars. (I got money for graduation.)
Robin
You can’t go wrong with the Grundig S350 Deluxe . Great reception, and it’s very sturdy.
I’ve just travelled around the world with my much battered but trusty Sony ICF SW100, that I bought second hand from eBay, and have had for three years.
It’s smaller than two cigarette packs, light, convenient to use, with digital tuning, lots of channel storage capacity, and while the built-in antenna isn’t good enough for weak signals, adding the active antenna (same size but much lighter) makes it very effective indeed - I could listen to the BBC World Service everywhere I went, from Tibet to the South Pacific.
My only complaints about the thing are that the ribbon cables sometimes break and need repairing (see my earlier linked thread on the subject), though on later models I think they’ve added a sleeve to prevent this, and the internal speaker is pathetic, but add some external travel speakers and it’s fine.
Highly recommended.
The Grundig Yacht Boy, designed by Porsche, is cheaper, and looks pretty cool, but doesn’t accept an external active antenna, which for me is an immediate “no”.
However, if I had the money, I’d get the top-of-the-range Sony, the ICF SW07. But it’s very, very expensive.
The British magazine *Radio Listener’s Guide * has just published the results of its tests on short-wave radios. The sets that received 5 stars were **Sony **models SW7600GR and ICF-SW100E , Grundig Yacht Boy 400 and Satellit 800 (the latter costs a hefty £500) and the Roberts R861 and R9914.