Review on Eton Grundig Satellit 750 Ultimate by Daniel Ogbebor

I am a radio amateur and most of my radios are at a higher level. Unfortunately, my "radio station" is on the other side of my house and I was looking for a tabletop radio for my bed. I didn't want to spend a fortune on a good quality receiver as I mainly use it to get to sleep. Grundig Satellite 750 has been around for almost 6 years and has received many conflicting reviews during that time. However, reviews have gotten better lately, mostly due to better quality control, and the retail price has dropped from $300 to under $250. I decided to try the radio and ordered. I was positively surprised. Out of the box the radio looked very good despite the looks that it's mostly made of plastic, but that's fine for this price range. My radio is manufactured in July 2013. The radio doesn't have any quality control issues like loose buttons or broken buttons that some people report. The tuning knob has a nice weight and feel. I consider this an improvement over the early 750's. The instructions that come with it are terrible. In fact, he's so bad and small it's even ridiculous. Luckily the radio is easy to use and I didn't need it for anything other than figuring out how to save memory channels. I was up and running in minutes with a standard telescopic whip. The AM(MW) and FM bands sound good. I was able to do AM DXing with the radio's built-in AM antenna rotating. The aircraft group works fairly well with the built-in telescopic whip. I live close to three major airports, so I've had no trouble picking up a lot of broadcasts. I also didn't notice any overloads in the group, which was a pleasant surprise. On HF and HF bands, the built-in telescopic antenna is a really bad option. Although this was not unexpected and expected. I was able to pick up some strong overseas shortwave transmissions on AM but heard nothing on SSB on the amateur shortwave bands. I decided to try a plain old piece of 10ft wire I had lying around and plugged it into one of the radio's external antenna connectors. Radio earned on the HF bands. I got tons of foreign SW broadcasts and was also able to get a few SSB QSOs on 40m and 75m, which surprised me the most at how good SSB sounded on the Grundig Satellite 750. With BFO Control I was able to tune in perfectly to SSB calls. I've seen many reports that the narrow 750 filter is too wide for SSB, but for the most part I don't think that's the case. The narrow filter appears to be around 4kHz, which is wider than optimal for SSB, but it works well unless the band is really crowded with strong signals. It works well on both SSB and AM SW bands. The wide filter has a frequency of around 9 kHz and offers good fidelity when conditions allow. The 750's built-in speaker is nothing special, but by adjusting the bass and treble controls I can make the sound sound good. The radio has several other features that people will find useful. There are two alarms. Audio input for MP3 players etc. And line output for connecting the radio to another device. All in all, my experience with my 2013 Grundig Satellite 750 has been consistently positive. No, it's not up to the class of my HF transceivers that I have at the radio store, but its performance exceeded my expectations. Update 12/2013: I have more time for my 750 and I'm still happy with it. A little research confirms that the "tuning knob oscillation" has actually been improved over previous versions of the 750 and all knobs are now metal instead of plastic. Also, the antenna now has a large metal cap instead of the plastic cap of the early 750's. If anything has changed from my original review, it is what I would have really wished for both narrow and wide filters to be slightly narrower. But it's not enough for me to change my mind about radio.