Dynamo & Solar Radio with Light Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)This unit is sub-par. There is one good feature, but there are many shortcomings. You'd be better served to find a model that is a little higher end.
The good features:
The flashlight, while not very bright, has the advantage of using multiple lenses. The standard lens is the clear lens, and the easily changeable lens can be switched out with either a red lens or an amber lens. The colored lenses can be used with its other good feature, which is the "flash" (think of a slow strobe) setting. If you were stranded by a roadside, for example, you could switch the clear lens for the amber lens and set the unit to flash and place it on top of your car. You would be easily visible.
The shortcomings:
The radio is pathetic. While FM reception is fairly clear, AM reception is really bad. It seems to depend on how close the radio station is. Which isn't right. I mean, I live 180 miles from WLS AM radio (890 AM in Chicago, IL) which people can easily get on their car radio for several hundred miles from the station. Why can my little radio in this unit only faintly pick it up? A mystery to me. The other bad thing about the radio is the antenna. It does not offer a 360-degree swivel. Basically, it is "tucked" into the back side of the unit (with no locking mechanism, by the way) and the antenna folds up or down. There is no back-to-front movement allowed. So, you have to fold the antenna up or down and then re-position the radio itself for front-to-back adjustments of the antenna. Very cheesy.
Also, the packaging this unit comes in boasts, "high fidelity loudspeaker." Ahem....that's a pretty tough claim to make for a unit made in China with a little 1.5" speaker. Except for Bose, nobody can get any kind of fidelity from a 1.5" speaker. And, if this were Bose technology you could expect to pay a couple hundred dollars for this unit. The speaker provides, at best, the same fidelity I got from the little pocket transistor radio I listened to in 1965.
I paid $22 for mine from eBay. I would not buy one of these unless you could get it for, say, under $10.

Click Here to see more reviews about: Dynamo & Solar Radio with Light

Click here for more information about Dynamo & Solar Radio with Light