Small Portable Radio's?

[Monocrom]

Curious if anyone has experience with a very cheap radio:
Baijiali model KK 9.
Extremely cheap radio. Might make a decent gift for a neighbor's slightly older child. I'd just prefer not to give away junk to a neighbor I get along with. Thanks guys.

 

[retiredone]

Recently gave in to the urge to add another cheap radio to the collection. I'd been watching some video reviews on YouTube by Todderbert. One kind of stood out. It was for a little AM/FM/SW unit from an unheard of brand, Rysamton. It was said to have good reception and sound decent. Furthermore it cost all of $16. First off, it's quite small - 4.5"x 2.5"x 1" and uses 2AA batteries. It's digital, has a dial light, sleep timer, rotatable antenna, key lock, and a kick stand. It sounds fine with earphones. No low level hiss and it has stereo. What really surprised me was its ability on AM. It pulls in stations almost as well as my Skywave. All is not perfect. It scans all the band to put stations into the presets. You can delete ones you don't want, but you cannot add those you want. But there are three favorites per band. Manually scanning the band is slow via a thumbwheel. Unfortunately there is no seek function, which would be especially useful on SW. Of course, no direct entry. Even with the shortcomings I'm pretty happy. I really didn't need this little radio, but that's never stopped me. BTW, I did just today see that this was available now with weather band instead of shortwave.

Geoff

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I have this exact radio and found the tuner to work very well but it sounds terrible. It's not very sturdy either which may have something to do with the terrible sound, it fell on the floor from a height of about 3 feet and something is rattling around inside the radio and I think it's the speaker.

The C Crane Radiosolar was 5 times the $20 I paid for the Rysamton and is way more than 5 times better. I used it when I was a long haul trucker and it wasn't bothered by the vibration and bouncing around and it worked great when I stopped for the night. It was nice to be able to take it with me when I went in to shower too. It's got a nice built in flashlight, came with a quality 18650, weather band with alert, clock and alarm clock and stereo FM when using headphones. I use it more than my stereo at home too now that I'm retired.

 

[Flying Turtle]

I agree that little Rysamton doesn't have the best sound. Not bad with earphones, though. Just make sure the volume in down before putting on the phones. My favorite radio is a Skywave from CCrane. They make a real quality product, but they're not cheap. But it's still hard to resist some bargains.

Geoff

 

[Flying Turtle]

Well, back in January when my Maksh emergency radio died, I threatened to research a new radio. A few weeks ago I pulled the string on another. After seeing a number of good reviews I decided it was time to get an XHDATA D-608WB. It has most of the features I was looking for, except maybe the ability to run on regular batteries. Excellent reception, good sound, dial light, clock, sleep timer, replaceable 18650 battery, compact size, and it even has full range SW. Of course, it has a charging crank, solar cells, and weather band alert.

The price of slightly less than $40 convinced me. I may be sorry again for not ponying up the extra bucks for the CCrane, but I can't help myself.

Geoff