I bought this when I worked a night job inside a building that had terrible radio reception. The job was mindless so many of us had radios to keep us awake. One of my coworkers had one and I was impressed with its ability to pick up signals in that building, so I soon had my own.

It's a very nice radio. It picks up a lot of stations that would normally be too weak to get with other receivers. It's got two speakers, a woofer and a tweeter, so sound quality is good, but it's mono; if you want stereo you need headphones or you'll have to jack it to external speakers.

Part of the performance is due to the input. In addition to the collapsable whip for FM, there's a ferrite loop inside for AM. And you get inputs in the back so you can hook on an external AM or FM antenna. That helps a lot.

It's got slide-rule tuning so it won't be precise. That's fine for what most of us do, but if for some reason you're trying to zero in on a specific frequency or if you want an precise read on what you're tuned to (useful if you're zero-beating an RF signal generator, for instance), then you're out of luck.

The killer is the power supply. It has an AC cable that's hard-wired in so you can't lose it, but the chamber it tucks into is a little too small, so putting it away is almost impossible. I have to leave the plug sticking out like a pig tail. The alternative is six D cells. No idea what the play-time is with batteries. You'd think with that many D batteries that it would run a hell of a long time.

I don't use it much anymore, but it's around as one of my emergency radios.

Current status: this radio is no longer in my collection. This page will be removed in late 2024.