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.