TECSUN PL-660 Portable Shortwave FM/AM World Radio Compact Receiver Black(UK-PL660-Black))

excellent little radio for shortwave enthusiasts,good stereo via headphone socket.

I love it

This model has been in production now for over ten years. There are lots of reviews of it among the SW listening community, and it's mostly very highly rated at this price point. I'm very pleased with it indeed.I bought it specifically for exploring the short wave frequencies, and the side-band. I wasn't interested in MW, LW or FM. If you only want quality local listening, on MW and FM you can get better for much cheaper than this, but as a short wave receiver it's very impressive.Mine came with a decent carry case, ear-buds, and a random wire antenna. I've only had it a few days, but so far it has lived up to its reputation. There's so much to explore on the short wave, or "world band", and this little receiver is an excellent vehicle for taking you there.

It does ick up a bit of RF on weak Stations. But it’s handy to us.

First impressions, neatly laid out and well marked.Supplied batteries are NiMH but as the main markings are all in Chinese it takes careful looking to see the capacity (1000 mAh).The soft carry case provided is well made and fits the radio perfectly. Unfortunately there is nowhere to put the supplied wire aerial or earphones when taking the radio outdoors (the mains power unit would not be needed for this, obviously). A couple of side pockets would be nice.First big shock was that there is no scan capability (Auto Browse or Auto Tuning Storage) on the Air Band, you will need to either tune through the band slowly to try and catch transmissions, look up possible local frequencies on the internet, or get a true Air Band scanner to identify channels of interest.As Air Band channel use is very intermittent (could be as little as 10 minutes use in an hour) the last of these is best, negating the use of the band on this radio.Stored channel capability is terrible. The method of adding them is easy and appears to work fine, but recalling them is something I have yet to work out - the book says to press and hold the VF/VM button, to select the stored channel, but this just starts a scan on the selected band and ignores the stored entries completely. Whether this is a quirk of the controls (maybe rapid repeat button presses ?) or instructions that are not accurate (due to the obvious translation from the original Chinese) I do not know, but in this section of the manual they are clearly wrong.As far as reception is concerned, the radio performs well and does pick up some faint stations that my ageing Sangean ATS-803A does not, although the really distant stations that need ionospheric reflection seem to be receivable about 20 minutes later on the Tecsun than the Sangean. It seems to struggle to receive signals in the period when the ionosphere is transitioning from day to night.Tone control is a bit limited (a choice of treble boost or bass boost) but useable.BFO operation is very good with a slightly narrower range than the Sangean.The extending antenna is fine for most use, and the supplied external wire works well on SW, given its limited length (about 5.5 Metres). This gives good reception on the 11, 13, 16, 19 and 25 Metre bands, beyond that the performance inevitably drops off but is still useable up to the 120 Metre band. With a good long wire antenna (60 metres with Balun matching and an old Maplin manual ATU) this radio was easily capable of matching the Sangean apart from the early evening issue noted previously. When the LCD on the Sangean does finally die (very faint after 25 years of use) the Tecsun PL660 will make a decent replacement radio.Fortunately I tend to use old technology to keep track of stations to tune in to (pen and paper) so the pretty useless 2000 capacity memory will not bother me, but of you do need to use the memory facility to store stations you want to listen to, I suggest looking at a different radio as recalling the stored stations on this one seems to be impossible.

Simply the best radio available

great radio nice layout works well hf bands will get better ant for bands will get my head around radiosoon tecsun tops

Could be a good radio with no chuffing but I noticed volume decreases with time and even turning it up on ssb makes audio really poor apparently common issue