Review on 📻 The ARCPT300W: American Red Cross Axis Safety Hub & Weather Radio with USB Cell Phone Charger by Brent Doolan

After reading some reviews and owning an iPhone I needed something that could charge our iPhones. Hurricane Sandy made us realize we can't charge them with our current Eton radios. I just received this radio and hooked it up to my computer overnight. After about 12 hours my battery was not fully charged. I may need to turn it on and let the battery drain to zero and then charge it. Maybe there is something else to try. The instructions say you can reset to factory settings by disconnecting the battery for 30 minutes. I'll try to update this later. Update 1: I opened the back to disable and factory reset it. Found the white connector has come loose. It has a key but doesn't seem to lock. The radio will reload and update later. Law of Electrical Engineering Y2K - 90% of all electrical problems are related to the plug (from many years of experience <grin>) 2nd update: Now the radio was connected after 24 hours with the battery plug fully inserted. The battery indicator shows three bars, but the LED still hasn't changed from red to green. So I don't know if the radio is fully charged or not. I wonder if no one from Eton is reading these posts and giving instructions? 3. Update (sorry for all the updates, but this is the most important thing!): When charging the radio connected to a computer or power adapter, the charge indicator will be RED while connected! If you press DYN and see three red bars on the display, disconnect your radio from your computer or power supply. When it's fully charged, the LED turns green, like mine. That's bad design, Eaton! Come on engineers, you can do better. The LED should glow green when the battery is fully charged, whether you are connected to AC power or not. Then I tried to charge the iPod with the device. At this point, my iPhone was fully charged. Remember that the radio was (presumably) fully charged since the LED was now green. As soon as I plugged in the iPod and pressed the cell button as instructed, the top bar of the battery gauge immediately disappeared, showing just two bars. According to Eton's instructions, there is a safety circuit that prevents a mobile phone from being charged when the device reaches a certain battery level. So whether there was an indictment or not, time will tell. I'll leave the iPod plugged in and post the charging later. The radio works well, the crank works, I'm used to retractable FM antennas from other radios and I like having a USB cable. It would probably be nice to use the top handle as a cord storage place, wouldn't it? Therefore only 3 stars for now. There's a lot of things Eton could do better to make this a really decent radio, including the instructions. I'm not the type of person to put 5 stars right away. I want to see that the product delivers what it promises. I will report later on about the iPod charging experiment. Last update: To test iPhone charging from a fully charged radio, I dropped my iPod 4G to 20% battery power remaining. For you iPod owners, this is when the battery shows red instead of green and you get a warning message. I then plugged the fully charged radio into the iPod and indeed the battery charged. Obviously it wasn't fully charged but went up to about 1/4 as shown on the battery gauge. So the radio does what it should. The documentation needs some help, but I'm increasing my rating to 4 stars now. I need a little more work. I hope I never need it again like I did during Hurricane Sandy. I am satisfied that the radio does its job in an emergency. Y2K