TECSUNPL-360 Digital PLL Portable AM/FM Shortwave Radio with DSP, Black

Just received my PL-360 today. Here are the first impressions after 10 hours of ownership.Build Quality - I've seen reviews criticizing the build quality of the unit. I don't see it. The unit feels substantial, the buttons have a very quality feel to them. The unit isheavy, but not uncomfortably so. The printed graphics on the unit are straight and quite legible. The volume and tuning dials do not feel cheap and give positive feedback when used. The headphone and antenna jacks are tight. The antenna is substantial and moves easily. In total, the unit seems to be well built and seems as though it will be durable.Reception and Sound - In use, I'm quite impressed with the reception and sound quality. I live in the high desert area of California and, while the bands are crowded, we are quite a distance from the cities and reception tends to be a very spotty affair. We also are on the eastern side of mountains so shortwave reception tends to be horrible. This unit is performing better than any small radio I have owned, and better than a lot of larger and much more expensive units I've seen. My other small radio (a Chinese made Grundig) receives, on a good night, 3 stations on shortwave. Without an additional antenna this unit is picking up over 25. I am getting 25 clear AM stations and 15 FM stations. I am clearly receiving AM from San Francisco and Radio Havana, two stations I've never managed to even get a hit on with previous radios. The external AM antenna makes a tremendous difference in AM reception.The ETM function (Tecsun's proprietary "Easy Tune Mode") works extremely well. It scans the band and pulls out the frequencies where it finds stations and allows one to scan through without manually hitting all the frequencies. A very nice feature.The speaker sounds fine, I agree with other reviews that it is a bit tinny for music but is fine for AM talk radio and shortwave, which are the two primary uses I will have for it.What's In The Box? - The unit comes with an external clip style antenna, a set of ear buds and a nice padded case.A couple of caveats - After spending some time with the unit I must say that the one weak point seems to be the connection point for the external AM antenna. I believe that any solid blow or one drop could very easily cause either the female connector to break within the unit or the male connector to shear off. Something to be aware of, and careful about. The other fault is with the belt clip, which is a nice feature but seems flimsy and poorly made in comparison with the rest of the unit. I don't trust it and have removed it from the unit completely. A small issue, but one which is inexcusable in such an otherwise well-made product. This is compensated by the case, which has a nice two way belt loop. Would be nice if the case had a storage area for the MW antenna and external SW antenna, but that is just nitpicking.I purchased the PL-360 to use at my job. I work in a very solid building with quite a bit of steel in the construction and a lot of fluorescent lighting. My previous small radio had massive amounts of interference from the lights. I am very eager to try the Tecsun and see how well it performs. I will post an update when I've given it a thorough test.Other than the small issues above I am very happy with the PL-360 and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.UPDATE: Wanted to add in some other thoughts after a few more days with the PL-360. This thing isn't just easy on batteries, this thing SIPS batteries! I've had the same three standard alkaline batteries in this radio through over 40 hours of listening and the battery display JUST dropped by 1/4. Amazing. And having now used it several nights at my job I am very impressed with the AM reception. Only in the very center of the building do I have an issue with reception, but even there it's still listenable, just a bit noisy. BUY IT!!!

This is really a "3 star" radio, performance-wise. Considering price and the above strengths, it gains at least one star. It's doubtful you can do any better for $50.Before going on in detail, an important word about shortwave radios in North America. Signals are often only available an hour or two a day, and the signals are often weak. It's important to recognize what is possible and form realistic expectations of what -- and when -- you can hear programming from afar.A good analogy is listening to FM is like going to the store and buying a fish. It's just there waiting for you any time you want one. Listening to shortwave is more like learning when the best time is to fish, and being there at the right time and patiently waiting for the fish to bite. Sometimes you will go home empty-handed. Conditions can vary from day to day, even hour to hour. I listen to Radio Australia overnights on 9580 Khz and 11880 Khz in the mornings, and it's great. 4-7am local is the best time to hear lots of signals at my location on the west coast. Your best times may vary.Also, spending a lot more money on a shortwave receiver will not necessarily result in major improvements in reception, because often background noise is the biggest limitation to the ability to hear signals. In almost every case, a better antenna will do far more good than a better radio.OK, setting realistic expectations that shortwave is often a fishing game:There are exactly two outstanding characteristics of this radio, both due to its DSP Si4734 heart: 1) outstanding selectivity typical of a much more expensive radio, and 2) scanning performance you can't even find at any price in other radios. The second benefit is testament to a good implementation of the DSP's ability to report actual signal to noise ratio rather than just signal strength -- something relatively new to SWL radios.Then there are the shortcomings typical of a small and cheap radio: sound and volume are OK but not great, there's no room for a proper direct-entry keypad, and (probably my radio is proof of this) quality control may be lacking.I've been an SWL on and off for close to 30 years and have owned and used dozens of shortwave radios (Drake R8, Sony SW7600G, Grunding YB400, Sony SW7600G, and others). For this reason, I'm going to focus primarily on shortwave performance, secondarily on AM/BCB/MW performance, and only lightly on FM. (FM was disappointing.)Keep in mind that shortwave is a weak-signal game for many in the USA, as there are no stations inside the US worth listening to, and few international broadcasters "target" the US anymore, so the "salad days" of many booming signals carrying fascinating programming (and fascinating propaganda too!) are largely behind us. This means your best bet is using this for travel or catching regional signals or international signals generally meant to be received elsewhere -- thus having a good antenna and an electrically quiet listening location is very helpful to maximize your enjoyment of the hobby. However, that said, on the West Coast of US Asia/Pacific stations can often be quite strong from the wee hours onward. Some cool frequencies to try are 11880, 9580, 11725, 9595 || 3925, 5025, 5040, 6000. Also check out short-wave.info for further information!Pros:Sensitivity is good, selectivity is excellent, and sound is louder and less thin than you'd expect from such a small radio. There is no meaningful bass, however.The tuning features are frankly outstanding, with ETM being a stand-out as convenient for SW at different times of day, and for FM and AM when you travel. I instantly took a liking to this useful feature. The memory system also works well and there are more memories than I can imagine ever using.But what really stands out is its "best-in-class" scanning performance on shortwave (and AM).What's special is both manual and automatic scanning tend to find *actual broadcast signals* rather than continually stopping on noise peaks. Most shortwave radios (at any price) have great difficulty distinguishing between an actual signal and a local noise peak, and end up stopping on a lot of junk signals that amount to nothing more than being louder noise than the frequencies on either side. To be able to push the "ETM" button or "VF" and find actual, even quite weak signals in a couple minutes without finding tons of spurious junk is just astonishing to me and apparently takes advantage of capabilities of the Si4734 DSP chip -- being able to compute signal to noise ratio -- that simply aren't feasible with traditional squelch-driven scanning. Welcome to a new Jeopardy category: "things you can do in DSP for $3 you can't do with analog circuitry for any reasonable price, Alex".The supplied external antenna, taken outdoors, really helped boost marginal signals to good readability. I am surprised and impressed the radio showed no signs of overloading and almost no broadcast band breakthrough - just one spot on 3rd harmonic of nearby 50kW AM station was heard, and it was not very strong. Cheap radios often come to pieces when you put any sort of real antenna on them, so this is another pleasant surprise. Again, it won't win any awards for dynamic range, but it's better than many inexpensive radios I've tried.As an aside, the AM antenna jack appears to go to the same input as the SW whip does, so you CAN attach an external SWL antenna with a mono jack into the AM in. However, according to the drawing in my manual there is a low-pass filter between the whip and the IC input that you will be bypass by jacking into the AM socket, so overload may be more likely. Then again, it might be fine depending on the particulars, so I'd say experimenting is worthwhile.UPDATE: Connecting both ends of a 25 foot wire to the jack in a loop configuration caused TERRIBLE overloading. 36 spurious signals going all the way into the 7 Mhz region. So, a big antenna should not go on this radio through the AM jack. It's still OK for 25 feet of wire to the tip connector though.Cons:Cons are various and mostly minor to me.The tuning dial mutes. This is annoying as it destroys the fun of "tuning the dial" to discover new signals, because you have to step and stop constantly. Even the ancient Sony SW7600G can do this well (via holding the "slow tune" button down and disengaging the sync detector). Not sure if this is a shortcoming of the DSP chip or second-rate audio design.In "VF" mode, tuning can take a while as you can only move at two speeds: 1 Khz and 5 Khz per dial "click". That's a lot of"clicks" to go from one end of a band to the other, though you can jump between bands with the SW up and down arrows to help out. This problem is inherent to having no numeric keypad and follows from the radio's small size, so it's just a trade-off you make in an ultra-light radio. If Tecsun wants to make a more excellent radio, making the firmware detect when the dial is going above say 7 clicks per second, to go to a 100Khz step to speed across bands. That would make the radio a LOT nicer to use. :)The goofy outboard AM antenna on top did not appear to be significantly better than the built-in one. Swiveling the radio for maximum signal or mimimum noise on built-in, and moving the outboard antenna through 360 degrees in the horizontal plane, I could neither hear nor see on the S/N and signal meter any substantial difference between them. No idea if this is a manufacturing defect in mine, a problem with my test method, or it's just a cute gimmick. But I will be leaving mine at home because I'm not convinced it does anything very useful. That said, I could see doing some casual DXing on the AM band with this radio in either configuration.I deducted one star because of a potentially fatal fault for some. It would be a deal-killer if I bought the radio primarily for FM stereo listening. There is a weak but continuous high frequency hiss on the headphones even with a full-quieting FM signal with the volume cranked all the way to zero. It's dead quiet through the speaker but very noticeable on headphones. Turning the volume up high to mask it is not an option as I would like to preserve my hearing. :) I suspect this may be an example of poor quality control rather than a design defect. At least I hope so. Please feel free to comment if you have similar problems (or definitely don't.) I'd be happier to discover this isn't a "feature" of this design.So in summary:1. Amazing value for money - five stars for value2. Buy it if convenient tuning features and great scanning are important to you. These are winners.3. Pretty decent shortwave - three stars (not considering price)4. Audio is good - surprisingly so for its size and price. But see #5:5. Headphone audio hiss - ignorable for AM and SWL, but this radio misses the target as the one travel radio to take everywhere if you can't enjoy FM stereo. Again hopefully this is a production defect and not a problem with all of these units.6. External AM antenna seems to be more gimmick than useful from my testing. On the bright side, you CAN feed SWL wire to the tip connector and avoid "clip-on" so long as it's not too long a wire, so maybe Tecsun would do better to re-label the connector "external SWL" antenna and put the filter in line there. It would arguably be more useful.7. It's a steal. Better to spend $50 or so and discover SWL is not for you than start with a high-end radio that can't do a lot more, and be out $250 or more. I think it's a great starter radio and also a good candidate to take on the road with you wherever you go.