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1374 Review
44 Karma

Review on 📻 【Enhanced in 2021】 Portable Survival Radio with Emergency Solar Hand Crank, AM/FM/NOAA Weather Radio, Weather Alert, LED Flashlight, 2200mAh Cell Phone Charger, SOS for Home and Emergency (Black) by Loren Jacobson

Revainrating 1 out of 5

Another suspicious "emergency " radio

I'm going to jump straight to the worst parts because I think you should know first. First, it comes with an UNPROTECTED 18650 battery. That's bad for those big lithium cells (phone batteries etc. have built-in overcharge/undercharge protection circuits), but it's ok if the device itself has built-in protection. It's not like this. The manual warns that the battery can be damaged as the radio never stops draining the battery (more on that later) and also if you try to charge it for too long. This is no joke, a battery like this can literally catch fire. Secondly, the battery compartment is not suitable for the only safe 18650 cell (which is suitable for another radio). 18650 batteries are not all the same size because the protection circuit is several millimeters long. So it comes with a non-safe battery and is not designed for you to replace it with a safe one. Okay, let's get the bad stuff out of the way and point out a few good points: 1. Ability to use 3 AAA in a battery emergency.2. The sound quality is good for emergency radios, a little below average. Not the best, but good.3. The flashlight has a better beam than most. This is a good board mount LED with a consistent color (no blue/amber spots) and a good reflector that gives a spot and flood beam almost as good as a real flashlight. It also has a good power button. And now back to some of the less good things, most of which aren't that bad but do add up. The tuner has both an automatic station search and a manual rotary knob. The button is a nice touch for digital radio and I'd call it one of the good points, but there's something very silly about it. A radio's brain doesn't update what it's hearing until you stop turning the knob. Until then, it will continue to play the station you were last on. So you hear 100.1MHz and start turning the knob and it keeps playing 100.1MHz even if the display changes to 100.2-100.9 etc. This is weird and renders the knob useless to manually search for new stations. I dont know. I'm already planning to stop there. There is a switch to select the battery or AAA alkaline batteries as the power source. Good: Choosing a rechargeable battery isolates the AAA from the circuit so they don't run out of power for whatever reason. Bad: Selecting AAA does NOT disconnect the battery (see previous warning about the dangers of 18650 endless discharge). So there is no real "shutdown" for a battery. The solar panel does not charge the battery at all. I left it next to a full sliding door window for a whole week (didn't use it at all) and it didn't do anything. One day everything blocked and the radio wouldn't turn on (the clock face was showing). I had to toggle the power button to reset it. Changing the power source often resets the clock to 12:00 even if you have both types of batteries installed. It seems that all of these emergency radios are specially designed. People who have no experience designing radios or anything.

Pros
  • 2200mAh POWER BANK WILL POWER DEVICES
Cons
  • Not sure