i have the grundig mini 300pe. It's got a great reception and sound but is hard as hell to tune up really well. If they'd raise the price $10 and put in a REALLY SMOOTH pot, it'd beat anything you can get up to $70. As it is, it's tough to use for SW listening, and a bit hard to really tune up well in crowded AM areas. The ONLY downside to the great reception is it makes your MW band crowded!
Also- if you own one don't waste your time on an antenna unless you are going to do a 60 footer. the little reel roillup ones do NOTHING for the radio. Making them is easy, you just need wire and an alligator clip.
There's a review on eham that states that it's a great pocket radio for the price for an experienced SWL (Shortwave Listener) or MW DXer, ut is too limited to be really fun for a casual listener. I tend to agree. If all you want is FM and AM, get the fr-150.
I have a couple of the eton fr-xxx hand cranks. The 150 is awesome for what it is, has NO SW capability. The others I've tried have really excellent receiver stages for shortwave and great tuning pots, but the analog displays are rough and innacurate. I wouldn't get one.
Then there's Kaito. Remember this name, Kaito. I have a little tiny (think moto razor sized) am/fm pocket radio that is amazing for being so utterly tiny, a couple shortwave sets, and some of their accessories.
if you want a real radio, at the best price ever, with an amazing sound and reception that's out of the world, the KA-1103 from Kaito is the one to get. at about $75, it's the size of a paperback. a 300 page mass market paperback, to be specific. that's bigger than the grundig 300, but not all that much. think of it as the equivalent of tucking an extra field guide into your gear.
In the package you get the radio, a set of NIMH rechargables (batteries INCLUDED? who are these people???), ac charger, radio, soft pouch, manual, and roll up antenna extension. The antenna extension is also really nice, being of thicker wire with a good rubberized insulation jacket- far nicer than the 24guage stiff and delicate stuff in the $10 reel roll ups.
The radio receives. It really pulls stuff in. Of course, I had to plug it into my ham gear and try it. side by side with my HF rig using one of my roof antennas for the kaito and my tree mounted antenna for the HF radio (yaesu FT-101) the comparison was quite good! oon speaker the kaito was a bit more scratchy and lacked a bit of depth of sound, but I could pull in the same 40m and 80m ham conversations on both just fine. for SW AM the kaito is amazing, and it was doing slightly better than my HF rig for AFRTS reception.
Which brings up another point- ham and afrts stuff is most often SSB, single side band. Kaito (also known as degen is parts of asia) makes just about the only sub $100 radios that do SSB. SSB is important for emergencies and makes listening a lot more fun when playing around, because there's often a lot of ham stuff going on and some of that is very important information in emergencies.
The ka-1103 has a good tuner (actually, the radio circuit components are the same board from the same factory as the grundig G5) with direct entry or knob spinning, a clarifier (fine tuning for ssb), clock, alarms, memories, a smart backlight, just about anything you could want.
The user interface is weird. No other way to explain it. It's just WEIRD. BUt it only takes a few minutes to get used to and some of the quirks are really nice- like the ac adapter powers the radio but doesn't charge the batteries unless you tell it to! and you set the charge time! This is actually really nice, but just plain weird.
It's about $75, i can tell you where i got mine, but just using google will be fine.
If you visit Kaito's website, you'll also see that they have what I think is the only digital tuning display hand crank emergency SW/MW/FM radio out there. I'm going to try one.
