Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I purchased this with the primary goal of time recording AM radio stations, specifically Coast To Coast AM with George Noory which airs locally from 1am to 5am. I thought this device would allow me to program in a 1am alarm time at which the device would come on and record the preset station. I'm still not sure if this is possible or not, but my inability to figure it out is making me want to return it. The problem is, the manual. This is not a simple radio to operate if you're looking to take it out of the box and instinctively know how to operate it. I'm usually good at that, but not with this radio. The functions of the many buttons and switches are NOT obvious. I dove into the manual, only to find the usual Chenglish that one finds in lower grade Chinese products. I can't understand why they pour so much effort into product development and scrimp on hiring a native English speaking person to write their manuals for English speaking markets. The manual claims, in its own way, that upon alarm, the radio will resume what it was doing when you last turned it off. So I set up the station I wanted to record, started recording it, set the alarm for 1am, and turned the radio off. Seemed simple enough. Oh, and you have to plug the earphone in because otherwise it would run the batteries down if the speaker was on because in order for you to have a useful volume for playback, the volume needs to be high during recording. The other odd thing is there's no way to program the alarm timer to turn the recording off. I checked the radio at 7am and it was still on, playing the station I wanted, but it didn't record anything. I'm still working on that but returning the unit is looking more attractive. Also, as another reviewer mentioned, the only tag for recordings is a folder and file number, nothing descriptive, so you have to remember what each recording is by its numeric label.
Some of the negative reviews stated the user couldn't even tune in stations. I think some of this may be due to the fact that you have to manually tell it you live in the US so that it tunes in AM channels in 10kHz increments, not the default Chinese 9kHz increments. Because of this, when I tried to tune to AM1180 the closest I could get was AM1178. Even though 1180 was a clear channel station, it was not clear as a bell, as it should have been due to the 2kHz offset. However, after I read the manual some more (ugh) and made the necessary correction, the reception was perfect, even inside my workplace where my old radio couldn't even pull in any AM stations. There's a simlar correction for FM stations which would block the lower end of the band if not adjusted properly.
So it is a handy, compact reliable receiver, but it has issues one should consider carefully before purchase.
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