Review on 📻 Retekess V117 Analog AM FM Radio: Battery Operated Transistor Radio with Large Knobs, Clear Dial, and Simple Operation, Ideal for Indoor Use by Elderly and Senior by Shawn Bass

I bought a Retekess PR12 because of the quality - an excellent very small walkie talkie. V117 is a whole different beast. Its working qualities make it suitable for some listeners and not for others. First a couple of good points: the sound from the speaker is excellent for a radio of this size. If you walk into a room and hear them play without seeing them first, you would assume this radio is bigger than it actually is. Headphones and headphones sound very good, with full and rich sound. You get mono audio from the headphone jack, but it's plugged into either side of the stereo headphone(s) - a nice plus. (Some other small monaural radios require an adapter to play sound on either side of the headset.) FM reception is also very good to excellent. This little radio picks up FM signals that some larger radios lack and sounds good as discussed above. You have a clear view of many FM radios - more than most radios and far more than most other radios of this size. The build quality and the handling feel are good. The tuning knob on the side is easier to use than the traditional thumb wheel found on small pocket radios. However, this has a downside: care must be taken when carrying the radio in a tight bag, as the protruding handle can be more prone to damage. So they have enough good or great qualities to justify the price of this radio. Most people these days mostly listen to FM radio and want the sound to be decent. If that is you then V117 is one of the best radios to choose from. Now the switch to AM delivers a performance that another reviewer called messy, and I'd say that's the perfect word for it. I believe this is largely due to the manufacturer's noble attempt to bring something to AM that few radios offer - wider AM bandwidth for better sound. Your favorite AM station - if it's close enough for this radio to hear it clearly - will sound better than you've ever heard it. Even music on the AM band sounds pretty decent with this radio, and AM voices sound a lot clearer than usual. This is because the V117 doesn't cut high frequencies like most AM radios do. But here's the problem: lack of selectivity due to the wide bandwidth, the AM tuner makes it very difficult to target a specific weak station. For example, if I turn the radio to point the internal AM antenna one way or the other, I can hear up to four different stations without even touching the tuning knob. These are adjacent channels that come on the same frequency. You will also find some other curiosities such as: B. a strong station coming from either side of a weaker station next to it on the dial. And, presumably due to the way the DSP chip works, sometimes tuning the scale produces loud, pulsing noises; In addition, when listening to a weak AM station, the volume of the sound may change noticeably from time to time, or the signal may be replaced by pulsating noise or silence. Again, these are weak AM signals. So what is the result of AM on V117: If you are listening to AM stations nearby, this is a good radio for you. These stations will sound exceptional - probably better than you've heard them on anything else - and they'll sound great. But this radio's odd behavior on weak AM signals will drive you nuts if you often try to listen to hard-to-reach AM stations. Between weak stations randomly flicking in and out and loud on/off hiss that can replace those weak stations with annoying hissing from time to time, you will get bored and switch to another radio. And it's kind of a shame, because this radio actually has good AM sensitivity when the problems above don't happen, but it's too erratic. Shortwave operates from 8MHz to 18MHz, which to me is an odd choice of upper and lower limits. Nighttime reception on shortwave (generally the busiest time for broadcasters) works best below 7MHz and this radio does not receive those frequencies. I think the shortwave section of this radio may have been designed for something other than North America e.g. B. for a country/region that uses certain shortwave frequencies for home radio services and possibly these are the shortwave frequencies that this radio is receiving. I do not know; only one possibility. On the shortwave band V117 I received only a few weak, unintelligible signals. For these reasons, if you need a usable shortwave radio in North America, you should buy something else. Battery life seems very good - I put in a set of AA batteries when I got them and they're still working after probably 25 hours of playback. In summary, the V117 offers excellent FM reception, sounds good and offers a wide AM bandwidth that makes stronger signals sound really good, but also seems to hinder optimal reception of weaker AM signals. Depending on what you want, this radio might be a good choice for you, or it might not fit as well as some other models. The four star rating reflects the many good qualities of this radio for its price.