Alinco DX-R8 Has Arrived

 My Alinco DX-R8 arrived September 18th. I have setup a listening post in my base where I have lower noise and easy access to my outdoor 75' Radio Shack antenna kit and water pipe for grounding. I am on my 6th day using the radio and the learning curve was not as steep as I thought it might be. A full review will follow but for now I will say I am really enjoying the radio. The scan features are exactly what I had hoped for but could never get in a portable.

Sangean ATS-405

The Sangean ATS-405 has arrived as well as the 8 bay charger and Amazon rechargeable batteries. First impressions of the radio are good. Lots of features I wish my other radios have like being able to turn muting off and on as well as an adjustable AGC. Another feature it has is squelch. I started using this recently on the 909X and love it and wish all my radios had it. It would great on one of my Tecsun's that will scan continuously pausing on stations. The radio seems to be well built though not as nice as my ATS-909X. I have not had a lot of time with the radio yet beings it is either 95+ degrees here with high humidity or raining. I hope to be able to log some time with it tonight. In my brief testing it seemed to perform well on medium wave.

New Radio On The Way

Today I ordered a Sangean ATS-405 from Amazon. The radio was priced at $82.86 plus tax bringing the total to $87.25. Along with the radio I ordered an 8 pack of Amazon 2400 mAh Ni-MH batters for $18.99 and a PowerOwl 8 bay charger for $13.78. All items are supposed to be delivered on July 20th. More info to come upon delivery.

Sangean ATS-909X - Revisited - A Weekend of DXing

I enjoyed some Shortwave radio time with the Sangean this past weekend as my wife was out of town so it was just me and my two trusty beagles. I started listening close to 0000 UTC as it has been extremely hot and humid in the Shenandoah Valley all month with temps constantly in the 90s. I do the majority of my DXing sitting on the deck enjoying a cold beverage while having easy access to my 75' outdoor antenna. The antenna has been shortened up to 60' due to the removal of 5 trees in my back yard. It is one of the old Radio Shack kits that comes with a 75' wire, rope, two insulators and a feed wired. I use alligator clips on both ends of my feed to connect to the long wire and whip antenna.

Most listening is done in the Spring, Summer and Fall due to the info above. I read about a lot of people doing a lot of their DXing in the winter due to good propagation conditions and the inability to get outside for other activities.

I have been pleasantly surprised by the band conditions in my area this year, much better then the past couple of years. This weekend I was able to log Shortwave stations on two new frequencies, a couple of hams, two pirates and probably the best catch of the weekend, WQFG689 on 1711 kHz. Per info found on Wiki they broadcast on 1710 kHz but I was getting very low signal there. On 1711 kHz I was pulling them in pretty strong while fading in and out. Also, I was pulling the signal off the long wire. I unhooked the antenna and the signal disappeared. This is traveler information station from Hudson County NJ. That is around 270 miles straight line to my house. I found this info on the internet.  FCC granted a waiver to operate five 10-watt transmitters on 1710 kHz, in Secaucus, West Bergen, Kearny, Lincroft, and Jersey City.  I consider it a very impressive catch. The Sangean continues to impress me in the lower frequency ranges.

Sangean ATS-909X - Revisited

I purchased my Sangean ATS-909X February 28, 2018. I was happy with the radio when I received it and used it for a little while. After about 3 weeks I had a static discharge event while using the radio. After that the radio was off tuning by 5 kHz. I exchanged emails with Sangean and they gave me some steps to try but to no avail, the tuning was off. Considering what I paid ($200.98) for it I was pretty discouraged. I used the radio a little since then but normally turned to my Tecsun PL-880 when I wanted to listen to radio.

Spring forward a couple of years and after a stint listening with PL-660 I decided to pull out the Sangean. Much to my surprise the tuning issue had gone away. This encouraged me to dig into the radio more. One of the knocks of the radio is it is dead on the whip with battery power and I won't argue the point. I have found to get the full potential out of this radio you need to either be hook up to AC with the wall adapter or the main way I use the radio, battery power and my 75' long wire.

This radio has the best display of any portable Shortwave radio on the market, period. When on battery the light only stays on for about 10 seconds but I am OK with saving battery power. One feature that I love about this radio is the ability to name pages. The radio comes with them preset with name and frequency by country. It makes me long for the good old days when the bands were full of stations fighting for air time.


I have renamed multiple pages as follows as editing is simple.

• Time Stations
• Weather Stations
• BBC / CFRX
• China
• Cuba
• Romania
• VOA
• WBCQ
• WRMI
• WWCR / WTW
• KBC / WINB
• Unid
• Ham band starting point
• Pirate
• Starting point between SW bands
• The radio will scan from just above one SW band to the top of the next one.
• Slovakia
• Wavescan

Each page contains nine presets. When you go to a page like WRMI that has nine presets configured the radio pulls up the memory spot that has the highest signal. I have multiple radio programs I like to listen to so being able to stores frequency by station type works great  for me.

As I stated in my list, I have one page dedicated to 1kHz above the top of a Shortwave band to allow for scanning in between bands. This works great when worked in conjunction with the squelch. I set the squelch to 2 and find that most hits during a scan will result in actual audio being found and not a bunch of noise.

The radio has an ats function but only works on AM and FM. Not sure why Sangean wouldn't have included the Shortwave band. When doing a scan of the Shortwave bands the radio stops on a station and does not continue to scan like my Tecsun radios do. Another shortcoming as far as I am concerned. I like to sit back with a cold drink and let a radio scan away only interacting when something interesting comes up.

As you can see in my blog I have a fair amount of portable radios. The Sangean is the only radio I own that finds anything on Longwave. I have found three different beacons while all of my other radios are deaf on on Longwave.

Tecsun PL-660 - Out of the Penalty Box

I was not impressed with the PL-660 when I received it and it was banished to a slot in my desk not to be touched. I spend most of my time using either my PL-880 or PL-380 for Shortwave and my C Crane 2E Enhanced for Medium Wave. I finally decided to have another go with the 660 and figured out how to make the radio work for me. First I must say that I do not have a newer version of firmware. I can't even check to see what version I have and am unable to fix the 5kHz offset when using the wide filter when listening to Shortwave. Here are a couple things I do that have helped me make the radio more usable.

• I stay in narrow mode unless there is something I am listening to where I want the best sound quality possible.
• When I go to the wide mode I just have to tune lower
• When using ATS I set the antenna gain to normal
• The 660 locks on to too many frequencies that are just noise
• When set to local I see a 10% to 20% decrease in detect stations but what is stored is normally a station that's not buried in noise

There are a couple of features with the 660 that are not available in any of my other radios that I really enjoy. First the 660 will scan the whole spectrum, not just the SW bands. I came across a Marine Weather Station because of this. Secondly the 660 has very good sync detect. The only other radio I have with this feature is the Sony ICF-SW7600GR but the whip antenna seems to be disconnected internally and the radio has never been very user friendly. I also prefer tuning ham bands a lot more on this radio.

Revisiting this radio has been like getting something new and is the radio I spend most time with right now. I have 24 new log entries with this radio in the past 4 days. While it doesn't have as many presets as the 880 I find that there are more then enough with today's limited amount of Shortwave stations available to listen to. I store them as follows

• Time stations
• Weather stations
• Most listened to stations
• Rarely heard stations
• Starting frequency of ham bands

One limitation that I have found to still be true is the radio is not great on the whip alone. I have a 75' wire kit from Radio Shack and when this is clipped onto the whip the radio really comes to life.

I was to quick to give up on this radio and with some listening modifications it has become a real gem. I still look forward to new radios coming out but Covid-19 has slowed that progression and I also fear the day when the last Shortwave radios will be produced. Until then, happy listening.

7/16/2020 A final update to this post. I have not been impressed with the FM reception of this radio. A scan in the middle of the day locks in a half dozen stations. My Tecsun PL-380 finds over 30. Also when listening to ham jabber on SSB the radio lacks volume. Some talk is barely heard though noise is low. The radio has some pros and cons. The thing I will continue to use it for is doing full scans from 1711 kHz up to 26.1 mHz. All of my radios server a certain purpose. Took a little while to find this ones.

New Radios On The Way

Turning 60 in a couple of days was a perfect excuse to pick up a couple of radios. Thanks to some generous gift cards I ordered two from Amazon. An Eton Executive Satellite and an Eton Executive Traveler III. They should arrive June 10, a day before the big 60.

These will be the first Eton radios I own. The Satellite has sync detect which interests me. I wish it had ATS on other bands but is limited to FM. A bonus is having the air band.

I ordered the Traveler just because I thought it looked cool.