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Review 1 of 1
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$0.00 Summary:
This radio is a nice show-off unit and any hamfest and at an A.C.E. free radio get together. Audio quality is very unpleasent to listen to with the 3/4" speaker, and not much better with headphones. OK for voice though, just don't expect a well sounding stereo system quality even with stereo headphones in FM stereo mode. This unit does suck batteries every 3 month, whether you use it in that time period, or not. SSB very unstable. Keep it away from temperature changes and electromagnetic fields like transformers. You even have to keep it away from it's own power supply. I had the older unit that severred the clamshell ribbon cables. I was able to buy new cables for $30.00 USA and fixed and modified the radio myself in about 3 hours. My MOD was to sand paper the ribbon cable's paths so that there were no more 90deg bends. Reception? MW better than what you would expect from a radio its size, but not super. Synco-AM helped at night with co-channel interferance and out of phase fading, but would drop out when station faded below a certain threshold. FM? Not too bad. Sensitivity appears to be around 5uV, which is on par with most modest priced FM portables. In a rural area expect to get decent FM reception, but right in metro RF gettos expect intermod, image FREQ's, even with it's Local/DX settings to local. Tuning down to 76MHz let you tune in to both TV channel 5 audio at 81.750MHz and TV channel 6 at 87.759MHz, but before the USA went DTV. Luckily I can still tune the Canadian TV analog channels. ON SW? I did hear, and ID, some pirate stations. All of them N. American. Having SSB certainly was nice here, as it was to RX amatuer radio QSO's. Although the SSB does drift on you, especially in battery only mode. Very strong stations that came up in SSB were ear piercingly shrill sounding. With the telescopic whip I was able to hear QSO's on 20M, 15M, and 10M. And also neat to tune up the local CB'ers like CH 19, 27.185MHz. I was able to even hear FM QSO's by tuning +/-2KHz to do slope detection. Raspy, but works this way to hear 10M FM repeaters. Final thoughts? Well for its time the Sony ICF-SW100S was a marvel that did just about everything you'd expect from a tabletop radio. Not as well maybe, but did it from a shirt pocket.
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