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The April Frequency Measuring Test (FMT) will take place on Friday, April 6, 0100 until 0225 UTC (the evening of Thursday, April 5 in US time zones). The format for the April FMT is a single-frequency exercise with one transmitting station in eastern Oklahoma, K5CM. Measure the key-down transmitted frequency and report your results.
Submit your results by April 9 at 0300 UTC, at which time the r…
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ARRL –
The April Frequency Measuring Test (FMT) will take place on Friday, April 6, 0100 until 0225 UTC (the evening of Thursday, April 5 in US time zones). The format for the April FMT is a single-frequency exercise with one transmitting station in eastern Oklahoma, K5CM. Measure the key-down transmitted frequency and report your results.
Submit your results by April 9 at 0300 UTC, at which time the r…
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Sunspots are practically zero. Solar activity is reduced to minimum and HF propagation is rather poor on the higher bands. On the other hand, the lower bandes continue to give DX satisfaction. April will still be a month of good propagation on medium-low HF.
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The ARRL Public Relations Committee is undergoing some changes under the leadership of new committee chair Steve “Sid” Caesar, NH7C, with ARRL Board Liaison and Roanoke Division Vice Director Bill Morine, N2COP, and ARRL Communications Manager David Isgur. An ARRL Life Member who has served on the PR Committee for about 3 years, Caesar succeeds Scott Westerman, W9WSW, as chair.
The mission and g…
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ARRL’s new Chief Executive Officer Barry Shelley, N1VXY, moved one floor down at ARRL Headquarters earlier this year to assume leadership of the organization with an overarching goal of promoting the League’s mission, “To advance the art, science, and enjoyment of Amateur Radio.” Shelley has spent much of his tenure at ARRL Headquarters toiling out of the limelight, so he’s a bit of an unknown …
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ARRL –
ARRL’s new Chief Executive Officer Barry Shelley, N1VXY, moved one floor down at ARRL Headquarters earlier this year to assume leadership of the organization with an overarching goal of promoting the League’s mission, “To advance the art, science, and enjoyment of Amateur Radio.” Shelley has spent much of his tenure at ARRL Headquarters toiling out of the limelight, so he’s a bit of an unknown …
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David, EB7DX will be active as S9ZZ, from Sao Tome Island, IOTA AF – 023, 1 – 9 June 2018.
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David, EB7DX will be active between 1 to 9 June 2018 from Sao Tome Island as S9ZZ. Look for him on 40-6m mostly SSB, RTTY, FT8 and some CW using 100w. Holiday style operation. QSL via H/c.
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Tibor, OM3RM will be active from Porto Moniz, Madeira as CR3DX during the CQWW WPX CW contest (May 26-27). Outside contest QRV on 80-10m as CT9ABN between May 19-29, 2018. QSL via OM2VL.
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This mail was sent to: mtw@charter.
For the fourth year in a row, more than 30,000 new licensees joined the Amateur Radio ranks, and the ARRL Volunteer Examiner Coordinator (VEC) conducted more than 7,000 Amateur Radio exam sessions, serving some 35,350 candidates for a new or upgraded license. At the end of December 2017, the US Amateur Radio population stood at 748,136. At nearly 378,000, Technician licensees represented the la…
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From the Isle of Music, April 8-14:
April is Jazz Appreciation Month around the world, and we are going to celebrate by taking a look at some of the roots of modern Cuban Jazz in both Cuba and the United States. This week, we are going to dive into some of the epic Cuban Jam Session recordings made in the Panart (now Areito) studios in Havana in the 1950s.
Four opportunities to listen on shortwave:
1. For Eastern Europe but audible well beyond the target area in most of the Eastern Hemisphere (including parts of East Asia and Oceania) with 100Kw, Sunday 1500-1600 UTC on SpaceLine, 9400 KHz, from Kostinbrod, Bulgaria (1800-1900 MSK)
2. For the Americas and parts of Europe, Tuesday 0000-0100 UTC on WBCQ, 7490 KHz from Monticello, ME, USA (Monday 8-9PM EST in the US). This has been audible in parts of NW, Central and Southern Europe with an excellent skip to Italy recently.
3 & 4. For Europe and sometimes beyond, Tuesday 1900-2000 UTC and Saturday 1200-1300 UTC on Channel 292, 6070 KHz from Rohrbach, Germany.
Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot, Sunday, April 8
Episode 57 is a Polish Polka Party featuring the music of Frank Wojnarowski’s orchestras.
Sundays 2200-2230 UTC (6:00PM -6:30PM Eastern US) on WBCQ The Planet 7490 KHz shortwave from the US to the Americas and parts of Europe.
In recent weeks the signal has had a nice bounce to Spain, Italy and Switzerland as well as Iceland, Ireland and parts of the UK. Also audible in Brasil, Paraguay and points North.
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APRIL 4 – Setting up earlier today (pic by E21EIC) MARCH 30 – A5A will be active again between Apr 4 – 11, 2018. Zorro, JH1AJT will travel to Bhutan with Jin, JF1IST and Champ, E21EIC. Main purpose is to meet with the foreign ministry to continue discussions on outcome and progress about the collaborative […]
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Dave, WJ2O announces plans for a South Pacific DXpedition. KH8 – 8 June (2 days) 5W – 11 June (2 days) KH8 – 13 June (4 days) KH1 – 27 June (10 days with KH1/KH7Z group) 3D2 – 13 July (4 days) Dates are approximate. Dave also mentions he was surprised to learn that KH8 […]
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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Aaron Kuhn, who shares the following guest post:
by Aaron Kuhn
Disclosure: This radio was supplied at a 99% discount by the manufacturer, costing me only $0.15.
I live in the Philadelphia Suburbs, where there’s ample FM Stations, good AM Coverage, and also a lot of noise when it comes to Shortwave. I’m mostly an AM/FM listener, who occasionally likes to dabble in Shortwave. My idea of a good radio is something I can turn on, put up the antenna, and it just works.
The Radio is boxed simply enough in a cardboard box, with a small amount of bubble wrap inside, manual, Mini-USB Cable. The Lithium-Ion Battery comes pre-installed.
Operation of the radio is mostly straight-forward, and I doubt you’ll need the manual for anything. The manual itself contains your normal badly-translated English phrases and doesn’t make sense in a lot of places (did you know this radio uses high quality PU edge big size?)
Two curious notes about the manual:
The radio itself is made of a slippery, glossy plastic that doesn’t inspire confidence, but also seems to have enough structural stability it doesn’t worry me. I’d guess this radio could take a moderate drop and bounce and be OK, but it’d probably crack if dropped from above waist level.
I ran into a somewhat funny problem trying to insert the included wrist strap into the hole in the back of the radio. Unlike most radios with a wrist strap hole that’s closed off, the wrist strap instead continued down into the radio. That is, the wrist strap “loop” molded in the plastic is actually a hole into the radio. This doesn’t bode well for dirt or other junk getting pushed into the radio accidentally. I was able to eventually get the wrist strap on the loop, but it was far harder than it should have been.
The Lithium Ion battery comes pre-installed in the radio, and the battery door it’s behind seems sturdy enough. Fortunately, there’s really no reason you should ever have to pull the battery out of this radio unless you need to replace it. Running the Battery model # across Google and other sites shows this should be a very cheap battery for you to replace at between $1 and $3.
Battery Door
Kickstand deployed with battery door open
Li-Ion “BL-5C” Battery
I very quickly noticed a big glaring design flaw on this radio with the poorly designed, super small kickstand located next to the battery compartment. This small, off to the left kickstand works fine if the radio is on a perfectly level surface like a nightstand, but causes the radio to tilt over if you try to place it on a soft surface like a bed or a pillow. I would have liked to see just one large combination battery door/kickstand if possible across the back of the entire radio.
Design problem number two with the radio became very apparent when trying to extend the telescoping antenna. The antenna butts up against the plastic molding on the back of the radio, meaning you cannot prop the antenna up “Straight” when using the kickstand. This results in the antenna having to angle off at around 45 degrees, which is a bit annoying. My Tecsun PL-310ET doesn’t have this problem due to having a cut-out notch to allow the antenna to be in a more upright position.
“Upright” Antenna trouble
Tecsun PL-310ET for Comparison
The tuning knob has a satisfying amount of resistance to it, and doesn’t spin too quickly or too slow. The volume knob, while smaller, spins freely and also feels solid.
The band selector selects between FM1-2, AM, and SW 1 through 9. The switch to move between these bands has a satisfying amount of click and feedback to it, and isn’t mushy and you likely won’t pick the wrong band. The small window displayed below each band number fills with a small, mechanical, plastic bar attached to the switch. The window and bar were slightly misaligned, making it difficult to tell at a glance which band I had selected.
The tuning bar itself moves smoothly across the band, but the metal extension piece running down the shortwave part of the spectrum tuning was not vertically straight and had a noticeable bend to the lower right.
Weight – this radio is INCREDIBLY light! The choice of a Li-Ion rechargeable battery pays off here, and when I weighed the radio it came in at exactly 160 Grams / 5.7 Ounces. The compact size of this radio and the weight would cause it to easily disappear into a coat pocket and I’d forget I was carrying it. This definitely qualifies as super-portable in my book.
The choice to use Mini-USB instead of Micro-USB on the charging is a questionable one. Micro-USB is the much more common connector you’ll recognize if you’ve bought a Smartphone in the last 3 years, or any other consumer device with a USB connector. Based on my short research, Micro-USB despite being smaller than Mini-USB, offers a number of benefits including increased cycle-count on the number of plugs/unplugs before the connector wears out. I don’t know why XHDATA went with Mini-USB on this, and I’d suggest they move to Micro-USB for future revisions. The Mini-USB, other than being slightly easier to plug in, seems to offer no benefit and is obsolete compared to Micro-USB.
Wow! While I may have had some hesitations about the radio’s design, I was incredibly surprised by both the loudness and fidelity of the speaker on this radio. The volume was incredibly loud, and the audio did not distort even when I turned this to the highest setting. While a mono speaker, voices on AM were quite clear and nice to listen to, and music on FM Sounded way better than it deserved to sound coming out of a $14 radio.
Plugging in a pair of earbuds (not included) also produced crisp, loud audio, with no noticeable whine or hiss. Volume levels should be more than adequate. Audio came in through both Left and Right earbuds, but I was unable to tell if the output was actually Stereo when listening on FM. The word “stereo” is not mentioned anywhere in documentation, so I would not be surprised to learn this radio is mono-only.
I don’t normally use analog radios, so tuning the D-328 was a bit of a challenge. The cramped display provided little feedback, and the crooked tuning bar didn’t help either. FM Stations seemed to be needed to be tuned “high” About 1MHz from where I thought they should be, and AM Stations about 50 KH above where I thought they should land. Tuning Shortwave seemed like a total crapshoot, being fairly imprecise.
I’m mostly an FM/AM Radio listener, and all the usual local suspects popped right in and tuned easily for me. Static between stations is kept very low, and when a station locks in on FM it pops in very clearly. Selectivity between close adjacent stations can be challenging due to the small tuning dial and skewed visual feedback, but I was able to tune in every FM Station I tried.
I am located in the Philadelphia Suburbs, so my usual station for tuning in a weak signal is WPRB 103.9 out of Princeton. I’m happy to report it came in just as clear as it did on my Tecsun PL-310ET, with no trouble finding it.
AM was more of a mixed bag with tuning. Stations I did not expect to come in clearly seemed to pop in with strong signal strength, while the “go-to” AM Test station of KYW 1060 proved surprisingly difficult to locate on the dial. Audio levels on AM were noticeably wider in variance of signal, with some stations proving almost too quiet to listen to.
I’m honestly not much of a Shortwave listener most of the time, so I’m sure some other reviewers will go into much more detail on the Shortwave performance of this radio then I will. My experience tuning around on Shortwave with the D-328 was similar to AM, in that I had a lot of unexpected surprises in strong signals between 6900KHz and 9300KHz. My shortwave listening usually takes place on digital tuning with the Tecsun PL-310ET, so it’s hard to compare analog listening for something I don’t do that often. Tuning was surprisingly easy on the shortwave bands, but seemed frustratingly random where stations would show up.
Let’s get this out of the way immediately – this radio does not record MP3 files. Instead, sliding the mode selector to “MP3” will let you play files off a “TransFlash” (MicroSD) Card.
I’ll be up front here – this radio is a functional, but not fun to use MP3 player. I tested the MP3 player by loading up a 2GB MicroSD Card I had laying around with some files in a structure similar to the following:
* Root
** File1
** File2
** Folder1
*** Subfolder 1
*** File 3
*** File 4
** Folder2
** File 5
** File 6
** File 7
The first thing you’ll notice when playing MP3s is the “MP3” Light that is Red. And blinks. And blinks. Yes, the red light blinks continuously while playing an MP3 file and you can’t turn it off. This right here would annoy me to no end if I wanted to use this feature
My second problem with using MP3 functionality is that playback without a screen is a throwback to the days of the iPod Shuffle. And if this radio had “shuffle mode”, I’d be OK with that, heck that would even be fun – but there’s no shuffle here, only sequential play.
This radio does seem to follow the expected order of my files in playing them sequentially 1 through 7 across subfolders, but the lack of visual feedback makes it very easy to forget where you’re at and what you’re playing. Pressing and holding the fast forward button does work to fast forward, and rewind through individual mp3 files.
If you want to load up a MicroSD card with some old time radio episodes and play them back – this might be great. But I’d probably ask you why you’d ever want to play MP3 files on this thing. I mean, the feature is there…. But why? There’s much better devices and experiences out there for MP3 Playback rather than loading files onto a MicroSD card to play on a device with no screen. I imagine this might have some utility usages for playing MP3’s when you don’t want to sacrifice more expensive hardware, but I personally can’t see myself getting much usage out of the feature.
At the end of the day I have to ask myself – who exactly is this radio for? The price point and feature set seems to pit this against the very low-end of the AM/FM/SW Market such as the Analog Tecsun R-9012 at $22, and Tivdio Digital tuning units around $18. The inclusion of Shortwave, Mp3 Playback, and USB rechargeable battery gives this a leg up over budget AM/FM units, as well as the competitors mentioned.
Is the DX/radio hobbyist the target market for this radio? I don’t think so. While cheap (and we Shortwave/HAMs are a cheap bunch!), this radio lacks the sophistication or features a DX’er would want.
Is this a good “throw-away” radio for when you don’t want to risk your “Good” Radio? Absolutely. I would not hesitate to toss this in a coat pocket, keep it out in the garage / workshop, or give it away to a friend. My personal use case for this radio will probably end up being I’ll take it to Baseball games to listen to the game on AM / FM while watching the game. If it breaks, I wouldn’t be too sad and would likely shell out another $14 without hesitation for a replacement.
Is this radio for kids? I don’t think so. Given the poor build quality of this, I can’t imagine this lasting very long in a youngsters hands and surviving more than a drop or two. Analog tuning is likely to prove incredibly frustrating to a youngster, and I can’t see anyone but the geekiest of little geeks making use of the MP3 player function.
Would I use this as an emergency radio, shoved in “go-bag” or kept around for winter storms / hurricanes? Probably not. The build quality and lack of standardized AA-Batteries would give me concerns over my ability to power it (though it did work great from a USB PowerBank when I tested) More concerning is I don’t know if I would trust this to still be working when I need it in a stressful situation.
So who is this for? This radio seems more destined / designed for the low-income international market. The price point on this radio is certainly attractive to North American buyers, but I just don’t think the average American radio buyer really wants or needs MP3 MicroSD Playback or Shortwave functionality.
For $14 XHDATA has made good, but not great, little radio. My future suggestions would be:
Many thanks, Aaron, for sharing your fine evaluation of the XHDATA D-328! I couldn’t agree with you more regarding your “future suggestions”–sounds like the MP3 functionality has marginal utility and the chassis design could use some tweaks. I’m very surprised a radio made in 2018 still uses a Mini-USB port. And that kickstand? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one more off-center!
But as you conclude, for $13.80 US (Amazon affiliate link), it is a very inexpensive unit. Not one for the radio enthusiast, but one that could please the casual radio listener. It sounds like the audio is surprisingly robust.
Thanks again for your fine review, Aaron!
Follow Aaron Kuhn via Twitter.
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